Choke Points Read online

  She picked up the sharpest knife in her arsenal and swished it through the air like a martial artist might do. Then she pointed the tip of the knife at the man’s eye and said, “I’m sure the Ministry of State Security taught you how to deal with living without your eyes.”

  He was scared now. More so than at any time since she jumped on him and pinned him to the bed. She moved the knife from his eye to his crotch. “Or perhaps you would like to become a eunuch.”

  The man told her everything he knew but not as much as she wanted to know. Bayla guessed the Chinese government had compartmentalized its information, only telling this man what he needed to know to accomplish his mission in the Azores. Either way, the man had a distinct desire to live and to keep his vital organs in the process. At least that’s what she thought through the process. Then, during one final question, the man seemed to contort his head strangely to the side when Bayla hit him in the right side of his face. Within seconds, the Chinese man was foaming at the mouth and flopping around on the bed like a fish out of water. Within thirty seconds, he was dead. Her strike had obviously dislodged a cyanide capsule from one of his molars.

  Damn. She was disappointed. With what she had found out, she could have used the audio to blackmail the man in the future.

  Now, she cleaned up her mess. She cut him free and searched the place for any papers that could help the Mossad. Then she retrieved her camera and microphones before leaving.

  Had she gotten enough? Maybe.

  A few hours later

  Still cruising through the darkness, Jake slowed the boat and finally saw lights along the coast of Terceira Island. A heavy fog enveloped the rocky coast, but his GPS had kept them on course.

  It had been a long night for the both of them, switching off in half hour shifts through the heavy seas, and then Jake taking most of the shifts once they got out in the open ocean, where the sea had actually calmed somewhat.

  “There’s supposed to be an isolated village ahead,” Sirena said.

  “I see it on the GPS,” he said. “But the fog is too thick now to see it visually.”

  He slowed the engines even more as they got closer to shore. Other than the lights from the small village, they were running blind.

  Sirena rummaged about in one of their go bags and came out with a set of NVGs, handing them to Jake. He had used them earlier in their journey, but did not need them in the open ocean.

  He put on the night vision goggles and lowered them to his eyes, bringing up the scene in a light green hue. “Awesome. I see the village and the entry to the small harbor. What can you tell me about your Israeli friend?”

  “She’ll be here.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking.” He turned to observe her expression of incertitude.

  “Bayla just turned fifty a few months back. She’s been with the Mossad for almost thirty years. Before that, she was in the Israeli Defense Force.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that she’s a bad-ass like you.”

  “It means you can trust her with your life. I’ve told her all about you.”

  Jake knew that Sirena traveled back to Israel periodically, and it wasn’t to visit family, since none of them lived in that country anymore. He suspected Sirena had been working off the books for the Mossad, or at least visiting old friends in that organization. But he never asked her about her time there. He still kept secrets from her, so he guessed that was fair.

  As they got closer to shore, Jake felt his phone buzz in his pants. Then he heard the same from Sirena’s phone. Both of their phones were the newest devices in existence, and would probably never be available to the average citizen. Gomez had provided these prototypes from his Spanish company, and the former hacker, Sancho Eneko, had encrypted each phone heavily. The phones had two modes—standard cell 5G and satellite. Both of them had turned off the satellite mode so they could not be tracked. Jake was still uncertain how the Chinese men had come to attack them, so he was taking no chances.

  But now their phones were pinging off a local cell tower.

  Sirena checked her phone and said, “It’s Bayla. She’s waiting for us in her car a block from the jetty.”

  Jake pulled out his phone and saw that he had an encrypted message from the Gomez organization. He tapped in the long password and a sequence of numbers came up.

  “Important?” she asked.

  “Gomez group,” he said. “I’ll have to check it out once we get ashore.”

  She got another text. Sirena looked at that one and said, “From the flight crew. The jet is waiting for us in Lajes.”

  “Outstanding.” Jake pulled into the small harbor and maneuvered the fishing boat alongside the pier.

  Sirena jumped to the concrete structure with a rope and quickly tied off the bow. Then she found the stern rope and tied that one off as well.

  Then Jake shut down both engines. He grabbed their go bags and hauled them to the outer deck, handing one after the other to Sirena.

  Together, each carrying a large bag, they wandered toward a small parking area. Only one car sat there, and the driver got out to greet them.

  Sirena and her Mossad friend hugged and kissed on the cheek. Then Sirena introduced Jake to Bayla.

  “You didn’t tell me he was so hot,” Bayla said, and then gave Jake a hug.

  Sirena ignored her friend as she put their bags in the trunk of the small sedan. Then she got into the front passenger seat. Jake got into the back seat behind Sirena.

  Bayla pulled out and quickly got to the main road leading out of the tiny village. In no time they were in the country. By now, a slight brightening of the sky gave them a clue to their surroundings.

  He found his phone and looked up the last message he had received. The message read: 4104003281533712150030850. He highlighted the first fifteen numbers and saved it temporarily. Then he opened his map function and pasted the number into the search area. His map came up with his location. The next three numbers were the elevation, or 215 feet. Then there was the Julian Date, 003, tomorrow, January 3. The final four numbers were the time: 0850. Now Jake had the location and time for his meeting, but he didn’t have who he was meeting. Maybe that would come later.

  While he had found the location and time for his next contact, Sirena and Bayla had been talking like the old friends that they were. But they were doing so in Hebrew.

  The only thing Jake could understand was when his name was mentioned and Bayla would glance at him in the rearview mirror.

  “Hey,” Jake said. “Could we keep it to English? Hebrew isn’t one of my languages. You could give me a complex.”

  Sirena glanced around her seat and said, “It’s just girl talk.”

  “I heard my name,” he said.

  Bayla glanced at Jake and said, “She was telling me how good you are in bed.”

  Sirena hit her friend in the arm. “I was not.”

  “It was implied,” Bayla said. “Obviously.”

  Jake raised his phone and said, “I have a location for our flight.”

  “Good,” Sirena said. “We need to give Bayla a ride off this rock.”

  “No problem,” he said. He hesitated, trying to consider how to bring up this next subject. “Can we talk about the elephant in the room?”

  Bayla glanced at him in the mirror and Sirena turned to look at him.

  Jake continued, “What in the hell are the Chinese doing in the Azores?”

  Bayla turned to Sirena and then back at the winding road ahead. “I had a little chat with a Chinese attache earlier this evening. Eventually, he talked.”

  “I’m guessing a Mossad officer could be quite persuasive,” Jake said.

  “Sometimes,” Bayla said. “Sirena says the same is true of you. Anyway, what I’ve found is that the Chinese are like the Russians. They compartmentalize everything.”

  “That’s because they don’t trust their own people,” Jake surmised.

  “True. It’s also very smart,” Bayla said. “Interroga
tion is nearly fruitless under those circumstances.”

  “But you still managed to get something,” he said.

  “Not enough. He thought I was CIA.”

  Sirena said, “Which meant he knew you would not hurt him too badly.”

  “Right,” Bayla said. “But it also meant he was afraid of the CIA and what that organization could do. He had heard about third-party rendition sites aboard rusted ships in the ocean in international waters.” She checked his reaction in the rearview mirror.

  “Don’t look at me,” Jake said. “I have no knowledge that those exist.” This was a lie, of course. The only thing he didn’t know was their current locations.

  “Okay,” Bayla said. “So, he mentioned that much of their activities were in the news.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Jake said. “They let us know what they want us to know. They’re the kings of propaganda.”

  “This is true,” Bayla said. “Which is why I was sent to the Azores. They say they want to use Lajes for research.”

  Jake laughed. “Right. They’re probably researching how to get away with converting the base to a strategic bomber base.”

  Bayla quickly glanced at him in the mirror. “What do you know of that?”

  Sirena touched her friend’s arm. “Jake has been ranting about this for the past year. Maybe more.”

  “I’m not being paranoid, Sirena,” he said. “Look at what they’re doing worldwide. They’re trying to build bases in the ocean where islands never existed. And in the Azores, they’re not just talking about taking over Lajes Field here on Terceira Island. They’re building a missile base on Santa Maria island. From there they can launch missiles across Europe and to the Middle East.”

  Now Bayla turned to Jake for a direct view, before looking back at her driving. “You have an astute understanding of the problem, Jake. But it might be even worse than you know.”

  He knew this instinctively. But he was trying his best to care less as he drifted toward a true retirement.

  By now the sun was trying its best to rise up over the east side of the island as they turned in that direction, crossing over the island toward the airport.

  Sirena turned back to Jake and asked, “Where are we going now that our home has been burned on Pico?”

  “For now, we go to our meeting. Gomez wants us somewhere east of Porto. How far to the airport?”

  “Ten minutes,” Bayla said. “By the way, the attache I interrogated last night is dead. Cyanide poisoning.”

  Jake sat back against the seat, knowing that the death of a Chinese intelligence officer would be a big problem. Of course, he and Sirena had killed four of them on Pico. The Chinese would want payback for that. If he had to guess, he would soon be getting a call from someone at the Agency asking who he had pissed off. Normally that list would be long, but he hadn’t pissed off anyone in China for years. Still, the Chinese were like the Russians—they never forgot anything, and had a plan for everything.

  6

  Sumatra, Indonesia

  Lee Chang had worked his contact in Singapore for the past few months and finally got what he believed to be a significant lead. Although Chang had only been a CIA officer for three years, his posting in Singapore was nearly pre-ordained. After all, his family had emigrated to the city state after the second world war from Shanghai. From Singapore, Chang’s father had taken a job in the tech industry in Seattle, where Chang and his sister had been born and reared. Luckily, Chang had been taught Chinese from birth and followed his family on vacations to mingle with his relatives in Shanghai and Singapore.

  Although he suspected the CIA would want him for his language skills, he had no idea that his chance to work in Singapore would come so soon in his career.

  His contact was an Indonesian man from Northern Sumatra, the massive island on the south side of the Strait of Malacca. Across the narrow strait was the peninsula nation of Malaysia. The Strait was like a freeway at rush hour, with shipping between the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean compressed to a narrow passage. Trillions of dollars’ worth of trade transited the Strait each year. Singapore sat on the tip of the Malaysian Peninsula, and had been built for trade ever since this trade route had been established centuries ago by the British and Dutch trading companies. There wasn’t a more vibrant city on the planet, Chang thought.

  Now, he followed his Indonesian contact through a jungle on a small island in the Strait, his shirt stuck to his skin from the sweat pouring from his body. He stopped for a break and took a drink from his water bottle.

  Chang’s contact had set him up with a local guide named Sinaga. This man was slim and short and from the Batak people of Northern Sumatra. Their only common language was English.

  “You okay, boss?” Sinaga asked.

  “Yes. I just need water.” He slapped another attacking mosquito. Then he took his backpack off and found more insect repellant. Chang guessed the sweat had washed off the previous layer he had sprayed on him getting off the boat. He sprayed down any exposed skin and tried to hand the bottle to his guide, but he simply shook his head.

  “That only makes them angry,” Sinaga said with a smile, showing off his crooked teeth.

  “How much farther?”

  “Not far. Just ahead.”

  Chang shook his head. His guide had been saying the same thing for the past hour. This island in the Strait of Malacca was not large, so it was hard to believe that it was taking this long to get to the remote location. He had asked the Agency to authorize a fly-over, but they had denied his request. For now. They needed on-site confirmation. Satellite images had been inconclusive.

  They moved forward again and seemed to be moving up hill again, his guide chopping through overhanging jungle with a machete as they traveled what had once been a tribal trail.

  “Are your people from this island?” Chang asked.

  Sinaga stopped chopping long enough to glance back at Chang. “This island, but from the coast.”

  “But you have been here before?”

  The Indonesian man nodded his head. “We would gather and hunt for food in these hills.”

  “How did you learn English?”

  “I stayed with cousins in Jakarta one summer. We watched Australian television.”

  That explained the Aussie accent, Chang thought.

  Just as the sun was starting to set, the two of them reached what must have been the highest point on the island.

  Sinaga pointed down the mountain to the north. Chang had entered the island by boat on the southeast side of the island, picking up his guide there on an isolated beach.

  Chang quickly pulled off his backpack and found his binoculars. Placing them to his eyes, he easily saw from this superior position the activity below less than a half a mile away. Now Chang knew why the satellite passes had not caught anything conclusive. A single road entered an encampment from the north. Although the camp was meant to resemble a Sumatran village, Chang could see signs of civilization—from solar panels painted to blend in with the green jungle, to transport vehicles covered by camo netting. He raised his binoculars higher and saw two large cargo ships passing through the Strait to the north.

  “Holy shit,” Chang mumbled to himself. He dug into his backpack and pulled out his digital camera with a telephoto lens. He shot images from every possible angle, making sure they turned out on the back screen. Then he took out his SAT phone, transferred a couple of images to the phone, and hit send. Next, he made a quick call to his boss, the deputy station chief, in Singapore.

  “What am I seeing?” his boss asked.

  “My contact was right,” Chang said. “They’re building a military facility here in the jungle.”

  “To what end?”

  “Did you see the last image? This is the choke point we’ve been talking about. If they cut this off, we’re in deep shit.”

  “Can you tell how hardened it is?”

  “Not from this distance. Construction is underway
, but it doesn’t appear to be finished or close to completion.”

  “It’s not an airstrip, so what is it?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it was a future missile base.”

  “Shit. I’ll run this up the flagpole. Can you get closer shots?”

  “It’s getting dark,” Chang said. “Maybe in the morning.”

  “Good work. Hang tight and get everything you can without getting caught.”

  “Roger that.”

  Chang glanced at his guide, who had heard only his side of the conversation.

  “We stay here tonight,” Sinaga said.

  “We do. What can you tell me about this place?”

  Sinaga shrugged. “Only people talking. Very hush. But Chinese pay the locals for work. Pay a lot of money.”

  “Can we get closer in the morning?”

  “Night is better,” Sinaga said.

  Chang agreed, but he also needed more than his first-hand account of the site. He needed proof to send to the Agency. He would rest a little and decide what to do once it got completely dark. Infrared images could be better than nothing at all.

  Lisbon, Portugal

  Chen Fang sat at a coffee shop in the downtown area, eating the national small custard pastries called pasteis de nata. She waited for the Chinese businessman, who had once been a general in their army, and was now running a number of high-tech companies without worldwide significance. But Wu Li Jin wasn’t just a general turned businessman, he was also a cousin to the current Chinese president.

  It was never a good thing being summoned to talk with someone like Wu. Either she had done something right and this man wanted to compliment her, or she had screwed up and he was about to threaten her with death or worse.

  When two men suddenly entered the coffee shop, Chen knew they were not here for the pastries. Like her, they were Chinese. The men were dressed in western suits that flapped open as they walked, giving them easy access to their handguns. They were a security detail checking out the place for any danger. Once they saw her, they barely acknowledged her presence before setting up their position strategically on separate sides of the small café.