Act of War

For Emily Bestler—the world’s greatest editor and publisher. Thank you for everything.

“Let her sleep. For when the dragon wakes, she will shake the world.”

—N
APOLEON
B
ONAPARTE

H
ONG
K
ONG

O
NE
W
EEK
A
GO

T
he air was thick with humidity.
Oppressive.
Typical for this time of year. It was monsoon season and stepping outside was like stepping into a steam room. Within half a block the man was sweating. By the intersection, his clothes were sticking to his body. The Glock tucked behind his right hip was slick with perspiration.

Guns, money, and a bunch of high-tech gear
. Just like something out of a movie. Except it wasn’t. This was real.

Turning right, he headed into the large open-air market. It looked as if a car bomb packed with neon paint cans had detonated. Everything, even the luminous birds in their impossibly small cages, was aggressively vivid. The smells ran the gamut from ginger and garlic to the putrid “gutter oil” dredged up from restaurant sewers and grease traps by many street cooks.

There were rusted pails of live crabs, buckets of eels, and shallow bowls of water filled with fish. Men and women haggled over oranges and peppers, raw pork and chicken.

Like the first spring snowmelt snaking along a dry, rock-strewn riverbed, Ken Harmon moved through the market. He focused on nothing, but saw everything—every cigarette lit, every newspaper raised, every cell phone dialed. The sounds of the neighborhood poured into his ears as a cacophony and were identified, analyzed, sorted, and stored.

The movements of his body, the functioning of his senses, were all conducted with calm, professional economy. The Central Intelligence Agency hadn’t sent him to Hong Kong to panic. In fact, it had sent him
to Hong Kong precisely because he didn’t panic. There was enough of that back in Washington already; and along with it, the repatriated body of David Cahill.

Cahill had been an Agency NOC based in Shanghai. An Ivy League blueblood type, who knew all the right people and went to all the right parties. He saw things in black and white. Gray areas were for professional liars, like diplomats and men who lacked the testicular fortitude to call evil by its name when they saw it. For Cahill, there was a lot of evil in the world, especially in China. That was why he had learned to speak the language and requested his posting there.

As a NOC, or more specifically an agent operating under “nonofficial cover,” he wasn’t afforded the diplomatic immunity enjoyed by other CIA operatives working out of an embassy or consulate. Cahill had been a spy, a true “secret” agent. And he had been very good at his job. He had built a strong human network in China, with assets in the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army, and even the Chinese intelligence services.

Via his contacts, Cahill had been on to something, something with serious national security implications for the United States. Then, one night, while meeting with one of his top assets, he dropped dead of a heart attack right in front of her.

The asset was a DJ out of Shanghai named Mingxia. Her parties were some of the best in China. Celebrities, drugs, beautiful women—they had everything. And it was those parties that had propelled her into the circles of China’s rich and powerful.

She was not without her share of troubles, though, and that had made her ripe for recruitment by Cahill. But when he died, Mingxia dropped off the face of the earth. The CIA couldn’t find her anywhere. They wanted answers and they had turned over every stone looking for her. Then, two weeks later, she had reappeared.

It was via an emergency communications channel Cahill had established for her—a message board in an obscure forum monitored by Langley. But since her disappearance, speculation at the CIA had gone into overdrive. Did the Chinese have her? Had Cahill been burned? Had the woman been involved in his death? Was this a trap?

She allegedly had information about a crippling attack being planned against the United States, but nobody knew if they could trust her. The Agency was desperate for information. And so it had called Ken Harmon.

Harmon wasn’t a polished Ivy Leaguer like Cahill. He was tall, built like a brick shithouse, and he didn’t attend fancy parties. He usually drank alone in the decrepit back-alley bars of some of the worst hellholes in the world. He was a rough man with few attachments and only one purpose. When someone somewhere pushed the panic button, Harmon was what showed up.

He had decided to meet the asset in Hong Kong. It made more sense than Shanghai and was much safer than Beijing, especially for a white guy.

Harmon had chosen the coffee shop. A Starbucks knockoff. It was busy, with the right mix of Chinese and Anglos. People chatted on cell phones and pecked away at keyboards. They had buds in their ears and listened to music or watched videos on their devices.
Whatever happened to a cup of coffee and a newspaper? Hell
, he thought,
whatever happened to newspapers?

There was a front door and a back door, which meant two ways out,
three
if you counted kicking out the window in the women’s bathroom leading to a narrow ventilation shaft. The men’s bathroom was a death box. There was no escape if you got trapped back there. Harmon didn’t plan on getting trapped.

A net of human surveillance had been thrown over the neighborhood. He’d picked out a couple of them. Men who were too fit and too clean-cut. They were Agency muscle, ex–special operations types. They were excellent with a gun and terrific to have on your team if things went sideways, but they were too visible and Harmon had requested no babysitters. His request, though, had been ignored.

He had also asked that they buy the woman a plane ticket so he could conduct the meeting in a nice, anonymous airline lounge out at Hong Kong International. It was a controlled environment. Much harder to bring weapons in. Easier to spot trouble before it happened. Tradecraft 101. That request had also been ignored.

Langley felt the airport was
too
controlled and therefore too easy for the Chinese to tilt in their favor. The CIA wanted a public location with multiple evacuation routes. They had cars, safe houses, changes of clothes, medical equipment, fake passports, and even a high-speed boat on standby. They had thought of every contingency and had built plans for each. That was how worried they were.

Stepping inside, Harmon scanned the café. The air-conditioning felt like being hooked up to a bottle of pure, crisp oxygen. He grabbed a paper napkin and starting at the top of his shaved head, wiped all the way down the back of his thick neck. He ordered a Coke in a can, no ice. He had learned the hard way about ice in foreign countries.

Paying in cash, he took his can over to the service station where he gathered up a few items, and then found a table. It was set back from the window, but not so far back that he couldn’t watch the door and what was happening outside on the street.

He carried no electronics. No laptop, no cell phone, no walkie-talkie. He carried no ID. Beside his large-caliber Glock, spare magazines, and a knife, there was nothing on his person that could connect him to anything, anyone, or anywhere. That was how professionals worked.

Removing a small bill from his pocket, he folded it into the shape Mingxia had been told to look for. A heart. He could do swans, too, but everybody did swans. It was the first thing you learned. He normally did hearts when meeting female assets. It was something different. Some of them liked it. Some didn’t. He didn’t care. A heart was just a heart.

When it was finished, he set it atop a white napkin. It was unique, but low-key, nothing that could be noticed from the street. In fact, you might only notice it as you walked by the table on the way to the ladies’ room—and even then, only if you were looking for it.

An hour later, the woman arrived and slowed as she passed the table. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to tell him that she had seen it.

While Mingxia was in the bathroom, Harmon scanned the café and the street outside. He sipped his second Coke and flipped through one of the free tourist magazines that littered every café and fast-food restaurant in Hong Kong.

When Mingxia left the bathroom and passed his table again, she found the heart sitting by itself. The napkin had been removed.
All clear.
She
hadn’t been followed inside. It was safe to sit down. Ordering herself a tea from the counter, she took the table next to his.

She was attractive. Better looking than the photo Cahill had included in her file. He could see why he had recruited her. According to the dossier, she had family somewhere that needed the money. They always did. Harmon didn’t want to know about it. He wasn’t here to date her, just to debrief her, and if necessary, help smuggle her out of China. He was glad she spoke English.

Reaching into her purse, Mingxia removed the glasses Cahill had given her and placed them on the bench between them.

Harmon had been shown how to use them before leaving the United States. He wasn’t a fan, though they were better than the earlier versions Google had developed for the Agency. The Lego-brick-sized projector had been replaced with one about the size of a staple. Even so, the glasses were still too sci-fi for his taste.

It was a better method of sharing information, though, than trading briefcases under the table or being passed an envelope full of reports and surveillance photos. The glasses also had a one-button delete function that scrubbed all the data if it looked like they were about to fall into the wrong hands.

Slipping them on, Harmon turned his attention back to his magazine and pretended to read it.

As the information scrolled across the inside of the lens, his mind began connecting the dots.

“Are you positive about all of this?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mingxia replied.

They would, of course, need more than just her word for it. But if this was true, the United States was in trouble.
Big trouble.

“What’s this bit in Chinese that keeps popping up?” he said.
“Xuĕ Lóng?”

“It’s the codename for the operation.”

“What does it mean?”

“Xuĕ Lóng is a mythical Chinese creature said to bring darkness, cold, and death.”

“What’s the translation?”

“In English, it would be called a snow dragon.”

W
ASHINGTON
, D.C., W
HITE
H
OUSE
S
ITUATION
R
OOM

T
he Secretary of Defense cleared his throat. “Mr. President, with your permission, I’d also like to suggest we move some Fifth Fleet assets out of the Mediterranean and over to the Seventh Fleet in the Pacific.”

“We should consider positioning additional bombers in the region as well,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs added.

The President studied the array of images displayed throughout the room. He had expected to be tested during his presidency, just not this soon—and not to such a degree.

Paul Porter was a two-term governor who had won election by playing to the best in Americans. He was an affable man in his early sixties. A tall, trim outdoorsman with a weather-beaten face, Porter looked as if he would have been just as at home leading fly-fishing trips in Montana as occupying the most powerful office in the world.

He was known for telling the truth,
especially
when it was hard. He never took the politically expedient route of only telling people the parts they wanted to hear. America could no longer afford to be given half the story.