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  “They aren’t coming up this hill. We are going down it. Four hours.”

  Borbikov muttered to himself. “Unbelievable.”

  Yelchin regarded the special forces major now. “I get it, Yuri. You actually want to fight.”

  “And you don’t, sir?”

  “What I want is to get the hell out of this shithole and back home to my family. I want to eat real food and drink clean water.” He pointed to the blazing morning sun. “I want motherfucking air-conditioning!”

  Borbikov did not hide his disdain now. “Air-conditioning, sir?”

  The lieutenant colonel softened a little. “Look, Yuri. Your passion is admirable, as is your bravery. But we do what we’re told.”

  Colonel Yelchin turned and left the roof without another word.

  * * *

  • • •

  Four hours later Major Borbikov sat high in the command turret of a BTR-90 armored personnel carrier, the fifth vehicle in the long column leaving the mine. His back was ramrod straight, his shoulders broad, and his head high as they passed the forward positions of the French and Kenyans.

  If Borbikov had been in command, he told himself, this would have gone down differently. Much differently. The major would have ordered his Spetsnaz forces and the paratroopers to fight for every last inch of the mine, they would have booby-trapped the buildings and the equipment, and they would have held out for as long as they could. And then, when the battle was lost, when Borbikov and his valiant comrades were all dead, the citizens of the Russian Federation would have known the mettle of its army, and the West would have known the danger that just a few hundred committed Russian soldiers posed.

  Borbikov knew his death in battle would have brought honor to the rodina.

  But he wasn’t in command. Yelchin was in command, and Yelchin obviously couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of here.

  As his vehicle reached the bottom of the hill and turned onto a dirt road that would lead to the A12 Highway and the coast, Borbikov passed a large contingent of Kenyan, French, and Canadian troops sitting in or on their armored vehicles, staring down the surrendering and retreating Russians with utter contempt. A small herd of rail-thin oxen shuffled lazily among them in the heat.

  The Kenyans were chanting and laughing. Hard to hear over the BTR’s engine at first. Borbikov concentrated on the sound till he could make it out.

  “Ishia, Russia, kumamayo! Ishia, Russia, kumamayo!” Over and over and over.

  Borbikov didn’t speak Swahili, but he could guess the chant was something along the lines of “Hey, Russia, get the fuck out of here.”

  Borbikov heard a sudden commotion up ahead, men shouting in anger over the rumble of the armored vehicles, and then he saw something slung through the air in the direction of the APC in front of him. Men riding on the BTR-90 ducked down, but no one raised weapons. Borbikov himself reached for his radio transmit key, but before he triggered it, he was slapped hard on his right side with something wet and sticky.

  He looked at the soldiers standing there, right off the road. Several French paratroopers had trenching tools out, and they were slinging something in the air toward the passing vehicles, laughing hysterically as they did so.

  The major touched his finger to the slop on his neck and cheek. Held it up in front of his goggles to get a better look.

  Fresh, wet ox dung.

  Borbikov glared back at the men throwing shit in his face, his chest still high and his chin still up, but inside he raged. He’d fought in the Caucasus and in Ukraine and in Syria, and he’d never suffered the shame of retreat, much less indignities such as this.

  Looking into the eyes of his enemy here, and then into the eyes of his own troops around him, he realized something.

  Everyone here thought this was over.

  But not Yuri Borbikov. No . . . this was not over. He made a vow to himself right then and there that yet another chapter to the Mrima Hill saga would be written, and he would write it.

  Yuri Borbikov would be back, and Russia would be the ultimate victors here, slinging hot shit on the vanquished Westerners and Africans as they retreated in shame.

  CHAPTER 2

  WEST COAST OF TAIWAN

  THREE YEARS LATER

  22 AUGUST

  A sliver of moon slipped out of the clouds just as the dark forms emerged from the ocean, fifty meters from shore. Two dozen jet-black wet suits shimmered in the moonlight and moved forward through the low surf.

  The men scanned the dunes in front of them through waterproof night observation devices, breathing heavily as they did so. The twenty-four heavily laden men were supremely fit, but they were not immune to the effects of the nearly four-mile swim from the submarine.

  Once on land and satisfied their ingress had remained undetected, Captain Chen Min Jun slung his rifle on his back and took an infrared buoy from a mesh gear bag. He turned on the device, then tossed it in the water, setting it adrift in the light surf. The wet synthetic-rope shore cable slipped easily from his grasp as the buoy floated with the flotsam back out to sea. Chen pushed the stake at the other end of the long cable into the sand, then blinked salt water from his eyes, lowered his waterproof night-vision goggles, and confirmed the buoy’s invisible light could be seen in his specialized optics.

  Chen turned to his men. All twenty-three knelt in the sand now, still scanning the isolated beachfront with their own night-vision devices, their rifles arcing back and forth with the movement of their eyes.

  The captain whistled softly, a gentle birdcall, and all eyes turned to him. He said nothing. He just raised his hand, then lowered it with a flat palm while pointing away from the water.

  The team stood in unison, moved up the beach across the moonlight, weapons sweeping for targets all the way to the mangrove and palm jungle that welcomed them with the sounds of tree frogs and crickets, covering the soft sounds made by the men’s footsteps.

  One by one, the men melted into the foliage.

  * * *

  • • •

  The unit found a clearing after twenty minutes’ push through the triple-canopy jungle. Captain Chen knelt in softly blowing grass and looked into the dark sky as he extended the thin wire-mesh dome antenna of the radio. The instrument was equipped with a digital terminal port, and he plugged in his small tablet computer, tapped a few keys, then waited until it made its connection with the uplink. Chen then pressed the button that read “burst” and the waterproof tablet blinked red, then green, indicating it had completed its task.

  Reliable Chinese computer technology, thought Chen as he folded the antenna up and looked out at his second-in-command, just a few feet away in the grassy clearing. Chief Sergeant Class 3 Liu stared back at him, awaiting orders. But Chen was in no hurry. He was calm. His training had always stressed the most important virtue of a special forces officer: patience. He took his time now, reflecting on what his team had just done.

  With only two dozen men, the Sea Dragons unit of special forces of the People’s Republic of China had invaded Taiwan.

  The Sea Dragons were stationed in the Nanjing Military Region, just across the Strait of Taiwan from the enemy island nation. The unit was revered by other PLA soldiers and duly celebrated by their leadership. They were the only unit in China allowed to wear all-black uniforms with a patch bearing the inscription “The Front Line,” due to their special mission to remain always prepared to invade Taiwan.

  After a nod between the men, Chen watched Sergeant Liu and twenty others move out of the clearing in small units and slip back into the jungle. For the next twelve hours the Chinese would work in teams of three operators.

  Chen himself stowed his gear, tightened his pack on his back, and stood. With a determined nod, he turned to the southeast and began walking. Two men trailed silently behind him.

  * * *

  • • •

 
Four hours after stepping onto Taiwanese soil, Captain Chen Min Jun left his two men high on a hill and continued down, climbing over a vine-blanketed stone wall, making sure to keep his profile low as he did so.

  As if to bolster his assuredness in his team’s success, a vibration from the computer tablet in his cargo pocket told him one of his eight teams had already completed its mission.

  Moving along the edge of a second low stone wall, Chen looked out and down into the city of Taichung. As the first glow of sunrise appeared in the east, he climbed the wall, then moved along a wooden fence line. And in the dawn’s rays striking the mist in the valley below him, he could now see the top of the crenellated walls of an ornate building in the distance.

  Chen looked over his tablet again now; the positions of his eight teams were represented by red and green dots. One team’s GPS location was about an hour old, but that was Corporal Xien’s group, and Chen knew Xien and his men would now be traveling on the number 12 North public bus into Taipei via the Xinhai Tunnel.

  Two of his teams registered on the pad as green dots now, two successful missions, and he was pleased to see both units were already returning to the south, toward the coast, in preparation for their long swim to the Shang-class nuclear submarine. The other six, including Chen’s dot, still glowed red, meaning their operations were under way.

  Chen began moving through the tall grass on the hillside along the fence, down closer to the large building at the bottom of the hill. As he advanced he picked out a particular building. It was the Lavender Cottage, a structure built in the center of a lush garden that was itself in the center of the Xinshe Castle Resort.

  Chen stopped again, brought binoculars to his eyes, and centered them on the cottage. A crowd had gathered.

  He unslung the sniper rifle off his back, a large German DSR-1, opened the bipod, and rested it on the wooden fence. He would rather have used his country’s reliable QBU-88 or even the new Jianshe Industries JS-7.62mm sniper rifle. But this particular German rifle had been etched with the exact serial number of an identical weapon the Taiwanese special forces had lost a year earlier in the surf zone in an exercise off Taipei. When Chen’s rifle was found after today’s mission, the assumption would be that it had been fired by someone in Taiwanese SF.

  Just as he settled his eye in front of the ocular lens of his scope, he felt a triple buzz on the tablet in his pocket. One of the teams was trying to communicate with him via text, but he ignored it now much the same as he ignored the sweat soaking his black bandanna and dripping onto his nose. The triple buzz, he knew, was bad news. None of the sergeants in charge would dare communicate with him unless something had gone seriously awry.

  But there was no time now to think of the other teams. Through the optics of his weapon he centered on the garden to the east of the cottage. There a large group of diplomats and military officers had gathered in the center of a sea of media. Panning around slowly, he found his target, just as the man began crossing a wooden riser. Chen recognized him from his gait even before Chen steadied the aiming reticle onto the man’s heart.

  The target stood at a lectern and waved his hands, facing fully toward Chen’s position. The crowd seemed to respond, but at a distance of one thousand meters Captain Chen could hear only the birds chirping in the brush next to his position.

  Chen dialed the windage into his scope, subtracted a click from the elevation because he was a little higher on the hill than he’d originally planned for, and then secured the butt stock of the weapon tightly against his shoulder.

  He took a moment to relax, to settle his breath. He pushed worry about the communication code from the other team out of his head, ignored his fatigue and his stress, and even took pains to detach his emotions from his work, blunting his adrenaline and steadying his hand.

  At 8:01 a.m., Captain Chen Min Jun of the PLA’s Sea Dragon commandos pressed the trigger and sent a .30-caliber round downrange, through the morning air in the valley, over the crowd in front of the stage, and dead-solid center into the chest of his target.

  The man at the lectern lurched back a step, then slumped forward, his head slamming into the microphone before his body crumpled onto the stage in a heap.

  With the recoil of the shot, the bipod that rested on the ivy-covered fence jumped slightly, but as soon as Captain Chen focused again through his optic the weapon was ready for a second shot.

  But there would be no need.

  Chen confirmed his target was down, and then he left the rifle in place and began moving toward the large wooded defile that led to the Dajia River. The two men above him had their own routes to the river, and though they were just a few hundred meters apart right now, he wouldn’t see them again for over an hour. He was looking forward to getting to his next waypoint, where he could take a knee, pull out his tablet, and check his text messages to see what the problem was with one of the other teams.

  As Chen approached the wood line in a jog he was surprised by movement close to him. He pulled up quickly, but not before he nearly knocked over a small girl who had stepped out from behind a tree. She was no more than six years old and held what appeared to be a frog in her hands. She looked up at him in surprise.

  With no hesitation, the captain pulled his silenced pistol and shot the girl twice in the chest. Her body tumbled softly back onto the lush grass, the frog leapt from her hands, and Chen continued on, stepping over her still form and disappearing into the woods.

  There were to be no loose ends. Her death, while regrettable, would fit nicely into the profile they were trying to create in the media.

  The assassination of the Taiwanese party leader who had allied himself most closely to China politically would never be associated with mainland China itself. The unmistakable image the local press would run with was that the ruling Taiwanese Kuomintang Party was evil and would stop at nothing to prevent a reunification with the mainland.

  Including assassination and murder.

  China would not be blamed. Why on earth, people would ask, would China kill their biggest ally in Taiwan? No, this would be linked to Taiwanese special forces, working for the ruling Kuomintang Party, and as Chen ran on, he knew the girl’s death would simply add kindling to the fire this mission had started.

  * * *

  • • •

  An hour later, after Captain Chen had made it to the banks of the Dajia River and reconnected with the two other soldiers in his team, he finally had time to check his mission tablet. While the others climbed into their skin suits, Chen fired up the device and executed the swipe necessary to unlock it.

  Looking at the map, he saw seven of eight spheres glowing green and moving toward the coast.

  But one bubble was now blinking yellow and black. It was Sergeant Liu’s team, and Chen’s heart sank. A note attached to the graphic said Liu himself had been killed, but his body had been recovered by the other men with him.

  Seven successful reconnaissance and sabotage operations, and one successful assassination, but at the loss of his best man.

  He shook off the terrible news, slid the tablet into a small neoprene bag, and began changing into his skin suit.

  Chen thought about the magnitude of what they had accomplished, and this helped him deal with his grief. Liu had died for something important. The integrity of China. This operation, he had been told, would help China reunify with the breakaway republic of Taiwan.

  Yes, Chen told himself, his chest pounding with pride, his fatigue and his pain a thing of the past now. Sergeant Liu died a soldier’s death, a hero’s death, and Chen himself should be so lucky.

  He and his teammates slipped into the cool water of the river for a two-mile swim back to the beach where they’d stepped ashore hours earlier. They would wait in the dense jungle till nightfall and then begin the arduous swim back to the sub.

  CHAPTER 3

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

/>   25 AUGUST

  0700

  Lieutenant Colonel Dan Connolly shifted his Ford F-150 into reverse and checked his rearview mirror as he backed out of his driveway. A car horn and the sound of screeching tires forced him to slam on his brakes. An angry Mazda driver honked again and then rolled off up the street.

  “Check the flanks!” Connolly barked almost reflexively. He looked down at himself to see if he had spilled any coffee on his Marine Corps service “Charlie” uniform.

  Nope, he’d dodged that bullet.

  A voice behind him spoke with even more zeal than he had at this time of the morning. “Check the flanks!” It was his fourteen-year-old daughter, Elsa, and she was teasing him.

  Sitting next to Elsa, Connolly’s twelve-year-old son, Jack, deepened his voice and repeated the mantra, doing his best impersonation of his Marine officer father. “Always check the flanks!”

  The kids refocused their attention on their phones as their dad pretended not to be flustered by his near miss with the passing car.

  Connolly checked over his shoulder more thoroughly this time, and then he backed out successfully on his second attempt. “What do I always say, kids? Mastering battlefield tactics is as much about repetition as it is about choosing the correct battlefield application.”

  Jack mumbled without looking up from his phone. “Backing out of the driveway is totally a battlefield tactic.”

  “At that moment the Mazda was the enemy. Stand by.” Connolly took a sip of coffee from a big red Marine Corps coffee mug emblazoned with the logo of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, one of his old units. He then placed it back in the cup holder. “Elsa, Mom’s taking you home this afternoon.”

  “I know.”