tell me if your wound is still bleeding?” he asked.
The soldier did as he was told. “Still bleeding,” he replied.
When he next heard Tang’s voice, the CIA man was over his right shoulder.
“You’re going to feel a little pinch,” Tang said. He had already pulled out his Otanashi noh Ken knife.
Before the Chinese officer knew what had happened, Tang had come up behind the exam table, clapped his hand over his mouth, locked his head back, and slid the blade into his neck.
Like a butcher’s knife going through a piece of birthday cake, it moved through the soft tissue without any resistance. It wasn’t the first time Tang had done this.
The trick was sliding the blade in just above the base of the neck behind the Adam’s apple, between the trachea and the esophagus. If you hit vertebra, you had done it wrong. Bone would stop even the sharpest of knives.
But Tang didn’t hit bone. He had done it correctly. With practiced precision, he rolled his wrist, sending the entire blade out the front of the officer’s throat like a fillet knife.
The man clutched and gurgled as blood sprayed from his severed carotids. With his trachea transected, his lungs began to fill with blood. There was blood everywhere, except where the man needed it most—going to his brain. Within seconds, he was dead. Billy Tang now had to move as fast as he could.
Returning to Hana, he stepped behind the sheet to find that she had expired. He tried to console himself with the thought that at least Jin-Sang would make it, but the entire team had a lot of ground to cover before they could consider themselves safe. Retrieving his pistol from beneath her blanket, he reached over and closed her eyelids. She had finally escaped the camp.
With the canvas bag over his shoulder, he kept his weapon hidden and headed for the front door. He stopped only long enough to take a picture of the Chinese officer and tear the unit patch off his uniform. Closing the exam room door, he used his picks to lock it, and then broke them off in the lock to make it harder to open in the morning.
He slipped the remaining lockpick tools back into his bag and then stood at the front door listening. He heard nothing from outside. Careful to lift the door so as not to groan the hinges, he opened it just wide enough to exit and then pulled it soundlessly shut behind him.
Tang retraced his footsteps, making sure to duck below the window line, and stopped at the rear of the building. Taking one last look around, he counted to three, and bolted for the fence.
CHAPTER 46
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BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Cheng didn’t need to see the explosion at the Nashville storage facility to know that it would be seen and heard for miles. Hidden in the cardboard boxes were two large cylinders of hydrogen. They would create an incredible blast and better still, an incredible mess.
He had always believed that if you were going to make a mess, you should make the biggest mess possible. The more the authorities had to sift through, the longer it would take them to figure out what had happened. Anything that gave him more time was good. There was a lot of unfinished business yet to be done.
The first thing on his list was to get rid of the Navigator. The police would be looking for it.
The safest and fastest thing for him to do was to steal a vehicle from a long-term parking lot. He hoped that by the time anyone knew a car had been stolen, he would have already abandoned it and moved on to something else. He headed for Nashville International where he located an older Toyota Corolla and went to work on it.
Once he had it started, he transferred his belongings into the trunk and exited the lot. Steering onto the highway, he plotted a course north for Kentucky. After Louisville, he picked up I-71, which would take him north toward Cincinnati and from there, Columbus.
He knew driving late at night was dangerous. With fewer cars on the road, the odds of being pulled over for a minor or even nonexistent traffic violation increased exponentially. Nevertheless, he chose to push through. He wanted to have mapped out his target and to be there when their doors opened in the morning. He also needed to send an update to Beijing. If he could also squeeze in