Storm Front

Xi Bang rolled her eyes. “Washington and Beijing are supposed to be so different. Capitalists versus Communists. Two-party versus one-party. Americans versus Hans. But underneath it, they’re all just a bunch of dirty old men.”

“Dirty old men are a universal constant across cultures,” Storm confirmed. “So will you do it?”

A knowing grin spread across Ling Xi Bang’s face. Then she immediately snapped into character, and a perfect accent from somewhere deep within the American South poured out of her. “Why, shoot, sugar britches, I’d just looove to have a little chat with the senator,” she said.

“That’s the spirit.”

“The only question I have is how I get into his office,” she said.

“You can’t just stroll into those buildings.”

“You can when you know the people I do,” Storm said. “Just get yourself on the ground in D.C. I’ll take care of you from there.”

CHAPTER 17

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa

It was all going wrong. Just awful, dead, horribly wrong.

Volkov had entered the operation a man down as it was. Not that Yuri had been much help when it came time to doing the wet work, but he’d been a warm body who knew how to pull a trigger. He’d had his uses. Nevertheless, Volkov had opted against hiring local help to augment his numbers. He never trusted locals, and besides, five men — five of his men, anyway — would be enough to do this job.

Naturally, there were security forces to contend with. Volkov had counted on that — every white person with more than two rands to rub together in South Africa had armed security forces, and a wealthy banker like Jeff Diamant had enough to afford a good one. As a result, Volkov and his men had spent a day doing their usual surveillance, locating the weak points in the ten-acre compound where Diamant resided, assessing security patrol patterns, figuring out where the cameras were located, finding the threats that needed to be disabled, making their plan.

Everyone’s role had been quite clear. They would each approach the main house through the trees that surrounded it, each coming from a different direction, quietly deactivating the various security apparatus he met along the way. They would surprise and kill each one of the seven guards who were stationed at various points throughout the compound. They would silently raid the main house and find Diamant and his wife asleep in bed. They would do what they came to do, what they always did.

The plan was perfect. Volkov never moved on a target with anything less.

Then Nicolai, who had been assigned to the south approach, had forgotten to take out the pit bulls that were known to guard that area. It was the first thing he was supposed to do after short-circuiting the electric fence and scaling the compound wall: find the sleeping dogs using his thermal night vision goggles, fix the silencer on his gun, and put two well-aimed bullets in the dogs’ heads.

Instead, Nicolai just inexplicably blundered on through, forgetting about the dogs entirely. The brutes woke up, making a bawling racket as they charged. Nicolai was able to kill the first from about five feet, but the second one managed to sink its teeth into Nicolai’s thigh. Nicolai beat the dog with the gun butt and finally shot it dead. But by that point, the dogs were no longer his biggest problem. He had not had time to put his silencer on, so if the baying dogs hadn’t alerted everyone to his presence, the gunshots surely had. Nicolai was still trying to pry the dead dog’s jaws open and get the thing’s teeth out of his thigh when a security guard put a double tap between Nicolai’s eyes.

From there, everything was just a mess. An alarm sounded. Floodlights positioned all around the main house instantly flashed on, illuminating the two hundred feet of lawn surrounding the house. Lights also came on inside the guard house and the main house. The guards sprang to life. They were surprisingly well coordinated, as if they had trained for this sort of thing and were merely implementing an oft-drilled exercise. They fanned out over the compound, immediately discovering two more of Volkov’s men, making their approaches from the southwest and southeast, respectively. A gun battle ensued. Yes, Volkov’s men got their shots in, killing one guard and wounding another. But they didn’t last long. Just like that, it was five against two. There was only Volkov, coming in from the northwest, and Viktor, approaching from due east.

Then they found Viktor. He also put up a fight, taking out two more security guards. But he was ultimately outflanked and ended up taking a bullet to the side of his head.

Volkov didn’t know any of this yet — or at least he didn’t know precisely. He had just heard a lot of gunfire and was aware his men were no longer responding on radio. This was more than enough to tell him his carefully constructed plan was now a pathetic shambles.