Operation Caribe (17 page)

That’s when a white and orange van roared up to the scene, lights flashing, siren blaring.

An ambulance …

“This must be my ride home,” Twitch laughed, still flat out on the street.

A man got out of the vehicle. He was dressed in hospital scrubs and had a surgeon’s mask covering his nose and mouth.

He grabbed Nolan around his shoulders.

“You OK now, Joe,” he said to Nolan. “We fix you up good.”

The man took a damp cloth from his pocket and put it under Nolan’s nose. It had the unmistakable stink of chloroform.

The last thing Nolan remembered the man saying was: “Breath deep, Joe. Count backwards from one hundred…”

*   *   *

NOLAN WOKE UP to the smell of blood.

It seemed to be all over him, in his mouth, his neck, his hands.

He was lying in the back of the orange and white van, the sound of its siren blasting in his ears, his body wracked with pain. His good eye was bleary and he could barely turn his head. But still, through the van’s back window, he could see the reflection of the trouble lights spinning on top. He was also being tossed around violently as they were traveling very fast—again. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious, but guessed it was only a few minutes. Twitch was sprawled beside him, still out cold.

Though groggy and aching badly, Nolan was nevertheless formulating a new plan. It would be a simple one. Once they got to the hospital, he would grab Twitch and run. Back to the ship to regroup and escape. There was nothing wrong with this approach. When the shit has unquestionably hit the fan, you take what you’ve learned, correct your mistakes, adjust your tactics, and live to fight again—that had been the old Delta Force way. Translation: They would come back to whack Sunny Hi another day.

Nolan opened his eye again. His vision cleared a little and he realized some things didn’t seem right. Neither he nor Twitch was on a stretcher, and no one was attending them. They weren’t bandaged; no IVs were stuck in their arms. And hanging on the interior walls of the van were not medical devices, but rows of carving knives and meat cleavers.

What the hell kind of ambulance is this?
Nolan thought.

He saw more unusual things around him. Styrofoam coolers. Bags of ice. Boxes of rubber gloves—not the kind surgeons might wear, but industrial-strength gloves that a clean-up crew might wear.

That’s when it hit him.

Jesus Christ …

How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Do you pee regularly? How’s your eyesight?

He painfully reached around his back and made sure there wasn’t a gaping hole where his kidney should be. He did the same thing to his good eye, as nonsensical as that might have been. He was bruised and battered and still under the influence of the Chinese LSD—but he knew what was happening here.

Your liver is worth more than a kilo of cocaine. Your kidney is worth its weight in gold.

Humans hunting humans …

Looking for body parts.

He started shaking Twitch, but this only alerted the two men riding up front in the van. The man in the passenger seat looked back at him and saw Nolan was awake. He tapped the driver and pointed back at him. The driver grunted once and sped up, turning up the volume of the siren as well.

Then the first man started to crawl back toward Nolan. He was holding a large carving knife.

Again, Nolan could barely move, could barely see, and was without a weapon. The man with the knife looked fierce, determined and capable of carving him up. This would not be a fair fight.

But then—Nolan heard a strange pinging noise.

In his altered state, he didn’t recognize the sound at first.

Ping … ping … ping
.

It was loud enough to stop the man with the knife from crawling into the back of the van, at least for a moment.

Ping … ping … ping.

Then a shaft of light fell on Nolan’s face. It was alternating blue and red. Another shaft of light appeared—same colors, same frequency. Then came another and another.

Nolan looked up at the van’s walls and saw a dozen holes that weren’t there just a few seconds ago.

There was more pinging, and more holes appeared. They were big enough to stick a finger through and they were smoking around the edges.

Ping … ping … ping.

Nolan managed to sit up a little—and that changed the whole acoustic dynamic.

Suddenly the pings sounded more like bombs going off and the holes were getting bigger and bigger.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Even Nolan was able to figure this out. Someone was shooting at them.

The driver increased the already-breakneck speed, but it did no good. In seconds, the van had been absolutely perforated by some kind of high-powered weapon.

The plan to relieve Nolan and Twitch of their kidneys, their eyes and their spleens had been interrupted. And now there was much confusion inside the van. The driver was no longer expertly cruising at high speed through the narrow streets; he was in a full-blown panic, weaving wildly around people, trucks and other cars.

A brutal crash—Nolan’s second this long night—seemed just microseconds away.

Shanghai?
he thought.
What an odd place to die.…

Suddenly the van’s windshield disappeared in an explosion of glass. The driver took the full brunt of the incoming barrage of bullets. Torn to shreds, he died instantly. His partner did the only sensible thing. He pushed his door open and jumped out.

But the van kept going.

And people kept shooting at it.

It seemed to take forever, but then came one more mighty crash. Nolan and Twitch were thrown to the roof of the van and then slammed back down again. Dirty water began filling the interior. It immersed the two front seats and stopped. From what Nolan could see, they had come to rest in a small canal.

Now he could hear people yelling—and the gunfire had yet to stop.

That’s when Twitch finally woke up.

“Are we at the hospital yet?” he asked simply.

The back doors of the van suddenly flew open and Nolan saw the faces of two Asian men looking in at them, guns drawn. Nolan was sure they were Shanghai gangsters, goons who would probably finish them off for good.

But after wiping the grit from his eye, Nolan was surprised to see the two men were actually uniformed police officers.

And surprisingly, they weren’t repulsed by his distorted features or his mightily disheveled condition.

In fact, they seemed very concerned.

“You have twisted face,” one cop said to him in broken English. “You cannot talk. You can barely see?”

Nolan could only shrug.

Then the cop looked at Twitch and said, “And you have big mouth and talk like a mental patient?”

Twitch nodded slowly.

Both cops got very excited.

One said: “You are the
Shatang nan ren
?”

Twitch had to think a moment. “The ‘Sugar Men?’ ” he finally asked.

“Yes … you are them?”

Twitch shouted back: “Yes, we are!”

The cops immediately put away their guns and started laughing.

One said, “Where have you crazy guys been? We’ve been looking for you all night.”

*   *   *

THEY WERE SOON speeding through the crowded streets of Old Shanghai again.

Nolan was holding on for dear life, the g-forces pressing him against his seat. Even Twitch was nervous, his knuckles turning white—this from a guy with a permanent Hawaiian tan.

The cops were crazier than the opium addicts, crazier than the kidnappers, even crazier than the ambulance-driving body snatchers. They were driving at least 90 mph on the tiny, crowded back streets of the old city, sending hundreds of people diving for cover and leaving a long, oily contrail in their wake.

There was no way Nolan or Twitch could ask the cops to slow down or even ask where they were going, because while one cop was driving like a madman, the other was shouting nonstop into the car’s two-way radio:
Shatang nan ren!

The Sugar Men. We have the Sugar Men.

Only one thing was for sure—they weren’t heading for the docks. In fact, at one point, Nolan glimpsed a part of old harbor as they were screaming down one particularly narrow street, and they were heading in the opposite direction.

We’ll never live through this,
he kept thinking as the police car went even faster.
After all this, we don’t have a chance
.

Nolan detected a glimmer of hope, though, when the cop car climbed out of the back streets and onto an elevated highway, pointing them toward the new part of Shanghai. But any thoughts the policemen would suddenly drive more safely up here were quickly dashed. If anything, the man behind the wheel became crazier—topping 110 mph and weaving in and out of heavy traffic like a drunken Indy 500 driver. He even used the car’s heavy front bumper—intended for moving disabled cars off the road—to push cars out of their way.

The wild ride came to a sudden end, and not with them wrapped around a light pole or crushed beneath a tanker truck. The cops took an off-ramp and screeched to a halt in front of the Shanghai version of a Mister Donuts coffee shop.

“Cops? Doughnuts?” Twitch moaned. “What are the chances?”

The cop manning the radio jumped out, ran into the shop, and returned not with doughnuts or coffee, but with a tiny plastic bowl of sugar.

He gave the bowl to Twitch as if it were made of gold.

“You must have this,” he said again in bad English. “You must have this with you.”

Before Twitch could ask why, the police car took off again and resumed its mad dash through the crowded, twisting streets.

Salvation came just three miles later—a distance the cops covered in about two minutes. The police car stopped at the top of a towering hill that overlooked the slums of Shanghai. A huge house teetered on the edge of its cliff. It had an ornate gate out front and a driveway that seemed a mile long.

“Who lives here?” Twitch asked.

“Your friend,” one cop replied. “The Shang Si. The Boss.”

Nolan and Twitch just eyed each other. Sunny Hi.

The cop doing the driving got out and spoke to someone inside the huge house via an intercom on the gate. Then he waved Nolan and Twitch over.

They climbed out of the cop car just as the huge gates started opening. Beyond were a half-dozen armed men, none of whom looked happy.

“Go ahead,” the cop urged Nolan and Twitch. “They’re expecting you. Give them that cup of sugar and everything will be OK.”

With that, the cop returned to his car and roared away, lights flashing, siren wailing.

Nolan didn’t know what to do. The guards were eying them very suspiciously. Yet if he and Twitch chose to leave now, he doubted these guys would just let them walk away.

It was the catch-22 all over again. They were suddenly back inside their secret mission, again with no support, no communications and, most distressing, no weapon. And no longer any good reason to be here.

Nolan and Twitch finally walked through the open gate and were met by the small army of bodyguards. They were searched three times, but all they had on them at this point was the little bowl of sugar and the clothes on their backs. Still, the frisking process took more than five minutes, interspersed with a lot of back and forth on the bodyguards’ walkie-talkies.

Finally, the guards simply told them to go.

Nolan and Twitch walked up the long driveway, a journey that took them almost five minutes. It was like walking into a dream, colors everywhere, trees swaying in unison. Water fountains rising up from nowhere, throwing up huge sprays in the mist and then disappearing just as quickly. Piped-in music was all around them, wafting on the breeze.

At last, they found themselves at the front entrance to the house, looking at two wooden doors so tall they seemed to get lost in the stars.

The mansion itself looked like something on the California coast. A palatial, two-floor beach house, half of it leaning out on stilts dug into the side of the tall hill. It had huge windows all around, most of them looking down on the expanse of Old Shanghai below.

It was impressive, no matter who owned it.

Nolan noticed one odd thing, though: a large pipe at the bottom of the house that went straight down like an elevator shaft until it disappeared into the shadows and dull lights below.

Escape hatch?
he wondered.

They knocked, meekly. The huge door opened on its own. They took a peek inside and were relieved to find no drugged-out gunmen or hookers here, at least not in plain view. Instead they found themselves gazing at a grand entranceway with a long, curving path passing through a vast multi-story indoor garden. Only at the end of this pathway could they see the actual front of the house.

They stepped into the garden room, which seemed as big as Grand Central Station—but of course, both of them were still tripping mightily. The ceiling and walls were made of brilliant, emerald-tinged glass. Exotic plants were everywhere, and a stream of sparkling water fell from a balcony two stories high. A pond the size of an Olympic swimming pool sat halfway down the pathway. Spanned by a bamboo bridge, the pond was filled not with plain old koi, but with strange and exotic saltwater fish such as wrasse, flame angels and cat sharks.

Dozens of cameras looked down at them from every angle, and no doubt the place was thick with hidden microphones, too. Nolan nudged Twitch and put his finger to his lips as casually as he could. Twitch got the message. Definitely no talking here.

A servant dressed in ancient Mandarin-style silks met them on the bridge. Old and gray, with a long, stringy beard, he seemed to have walked out of a 1930s movie.

He bowed. They bowed back. He bowed again, then said in Wu: “My employer is looking forward to meeting you.”

He made no comment on their rather ragged condition. He took them out of the garden, through the front entrance of the house, and into a grand room that looked like a real Mandarin throne room. The soaring columns, the gilding, the artwork and architecture—it was as if they’d been transported back in time to ancient China, except for one thing. In one corner of this huge room was a McDonald’s hamburger stand.