“Good. You should also know that if the electronic signals in our brains get fried, the explosives will be triggered automatically. So toss your mini-EMP device near my foot so I can put it out of commission. I don’t like taking any chances.”
“What EMP device?” asked Tessa.
“Come on, Major. We’re prepared to die if that’s what it takes. Are you?”
Tessa frowned, but shoved a hand inside the waistband of her pants, at her left hip, and removed what looked like a black plastic key fob, a little larger than a lighter. As far as I knew, she had at least two hidden pockets sewn into each pair of pants she owned. She slid the device under Ming’s foot, and he promptly smashed it into tiny pieces.
“I feel safer already,” he said.
Tessa had told me that a number of elite special forces soldiers now carried EMP devices as a matter of course, both integrated into their rifles and in the form that Tessa carried. These devices would send out an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to disrupt all electronics within about a hundred-yard radius, the perfect weapon for the most desperate of circumstances.
Typically, it would only be used as a measure of last resort, since it would fry one’s own electronics. But the pulse could disrupt enemy cars, drones, computers, and in some cases, guns and prison cells, as more and more devices that had once been low-tech began integrating electronics into their designs.
I knew that Tessa would feel naked without this device, and I’m sure she had planned on using it. All in all, if Ming’s imaginary suicide vests truly were rigged to blow if electronics were disrupted, we were lucky he remembered to tell us in time.
“Now give me your comms, Major,” said Ming.
Tessa shook her head. “My men think I’m busy interrogating you,” she pointed out. “They won’t interrupt unless additional hostiles are approaching Jason’s rental home—or this warehouse. Which is information we all might find useful.
“Regardless,” she added, “if they contact me and I don’t answer, they’ll be here so fast your head will spin.”
Ming nodded. “You have a point,” he allowed. “Keep your comms.” He nodded toward his restraints. “But free us. Now!”
“Don’t even think about it!” I said to Tessa, feeling my mental faculties returning. “Why should we free you, Ming? So you can shoot us all in the head without having the courtesy of dying yourselves?”
“No. My offer stands. If you tell us what you know, we’ll leave you in peace. You think we already have the answers and came here to kill you. But we didn’t. All we want is to learn the truth. Depending on what that is, we plan to let you go. Worst case, we might have to take you prisoner so you can’t go public. But if this does become necessary, I promise you’ll live in luxury and be treated as an honored guest.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You’re lying, Ming. I know exactly how the Chinese Communist Party treat their prisoners. And it isn’t as honored guests.”
Ming glanced at his four remaining comrades and blew out a long breath, as if wrestling with a difficult decision. “We aren’t Chinese,” he said finally. “We’re from Taiwan. And I haven’t lied to you about anything.”
I stared deeply into Ming’s eyes, and my intuition told me that not only was he telling the truth, but that this changed the equation in dramatic fashion. “Free them,” I said to Tessa.
I turned toward the prisoners. “Okay, Ming, you have a deal. Answer my questions honestly and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
9
Tessa and I sat next to each other on a tan cushioned sofa we had moved closer to the extended row of steel chairs, while Captain Dombkowski and Lieutenant Connelly sat in black leather desk chairs to our right.
All of us were facing the five remaining Chinese hostiles, now likely Taiwanese hostiles, seated at the edge of the steel chair row, as far away as possible from their exploded comrade, a gruesome headless figure held slumped in place only by the four zip ties still affixing him to the chair. Bits of brain and flesh decorated his corpse, while several quarts of sticky red blood that had poured from his open neck were pooled on the floor at his feet.
The men who had formerly been our prisoners had raided the rucksack the captain had brought, reinserting their comms and reclaiming possession of their weapons and belongings. Ming had a brief conversation with his comrades in Mandarin and then spent several minutes speaking with someone at a remote location through his comm.
“What was that all about?” I asked when he finished.
“Not important,” said Ming.
Tessa sighed. “He gave a situation report to his support team back in Taiwan,” she said. “He provided GPS coordinates to this warehouse. They’ve been flying a surveillance drone over the ocean, just off the San Diego coast. He ordered them to reposition it so it could watch all approaches to this site, in case I was lying when I said no one would be coming.”
She paused. “He then arranged for reinforcements and described his plan to drive our armored van to meet a helicopter in the desert for exfiltration. With their drone ensuring they aren’t followed. The helicopter will take them to a jet for the return trip home. They’ll be staying here for about an hour while everything is put into place.”
Ming looked utterly shocked, and it was clear that he’d been thrown off his game for the first time. “Very good, Major,” he said with an anxious expression. His eyes narrowed in thought. “Were you expecting us, then?”
Tessa shook her head.
“So you just happen to speak perfect Mandarin?”
“Lucky for me, huh?” she said with a smile.
I tried to maintain a poker face, but I was even more surprised than Ming. How had this not come up in the six months we’d been living and working together? And in the five that we’d been sleeping together?