Page 14 of Rising Tiger

As soon as the plane zoomed past, he could see Haney and Gage, harnessed up, on opposite sides of its lowered tail ramp.

Haney directed Harvath in, while Gage had his rifle at the ready, manning overwatch.

Harvath leaned into the center of the runway and lined up with the Antonov’s ramp. The security vehicles behind him were so close, hecould hear the blaring of their Klaxons over the roaring of the plane. Their strobes pulsed the aircraft in bursts of hot light.

When Haney announced, “Now!” over the radio, Harvath opened the throttle the rest of the way as Gage began firing toward the security vehicles, sending them scattering off the runway.

The plane then slowed, just enough, and Harvath raced up the ramp. As soon as he was inside, Haney radioed, “Got him! Go for wheels up!”

“Roger that,” Staelin responded, relaying the command into the cockpit. “Going for wheels up.”

The pilots revved the plane’s enormous engines as Haney closed the tail ramp and Gage secured his weapon.

Before Harvath could turn off the motorcycle, it sputtered one last time and died, totally out of fuel.

Haney grinned. “I told you your plan sucked.”

Harvath grinned back as he hurriedly climbed off the bike. “A bad plan executed with balls always beats a good plan that’s gone to shit.”

“Classy. Clausewitz?”

“Bismarck,” interjected Gage, as he joined the pair and helped quickly strap down the motorcycle.

As the plane lifted off, the men grabbed the closest seats they could find. Most of his teammates eventually closed their eyes and tried to get some sleep. It had been a long, hard night.

Harvath, however, found it difficult to drift off. Even the deep, meditative-like state he often dipped into before missions was proving elusive.

He was still wound pretty tight from the operation. That was to be expected. Nevertheless, he had always been capable of shutting off that part of his brain and powering down.

Was he concerned about the plane making it back to Tajikistan? He had flown on much worse aircraft and statistically, the odds were in their favor. What’s more, the Taliban had very few functioning aircraft, and even fewer pilots, that they could call on to give chase. And even if they did, Afghanistan’s radar monitoring system was all but defunct.

As an added layer of protection, the Antonov’s pilots had filed a phony flight plan, taking them east into Pakistan, rather than north to Tajikistan.Minutes after takeoff, they shut down their transponder and changed course.

The Taliban wouldn’t have just been looking for a needle, they would have been searching for the actual haystack—and they would have had to do it blindfolded.

So, what was it then? What was eating away at the back of his mind? Harvath couldn’t put his finger on it. All he knew was that something was coming.

Something very bad.

CHAPTER 9

WEDNESDAY

BEIJING

Military intelligence for the People’s Liberation Army was handled by the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission Intelligence Bureau. It was quite a mouthful.

Only six years into the name change and Colonel Yang Xin still hated it. He much preferred when the organization was known as the Intelligence Bureau of the General Staff, or more simply, the Second Bureau.

Even the acronym, JSDCMCIB, was a tongue-twister. China, like so many of the Western nations it despised, was being choked to death by bureaucracy. When your “rebrand” ended up lengthening your name, rather than shortening it, Yang figured things probably weren’t headed in a positive direction.

China, via its horribly conceived one-child policy, was heading straight for a demographic tsunami. Though the program had been jettisoned right around the time his organization got its name change, the damage had already been done.

The buckets of water next to birthing beds, ready to drown female babies, had not only been immoral, but had also been a form of slow-motion suicide for the nation.

Every single day, somewhere in China, there was civil unrest—often in multiple places. Now, with hundreds of millions of men coming of age, unable to find wives and girlfriends, things were only going to get worse.

With Russian men dropping like flies from drug and alcohol addiction, a professor from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences had put forth the idea that China and Russia each had fifty percent of a puzzle that needed fixing.

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