Rising Tiger: A Thriller (15)

The Science and Technology Commission had been working on a suite of directed-energy weapons and had wanted to test their latest under actual battlefield conditions. Yang had been all too happy to provide the opportunity.

The weapon had exceeded expectations, repelling all of the enemy combatants while providing exceptional cover for the Chinese soldiers to escape. Today they were going to employ two different weapons, six and a half hours apart, on two different sides of the world. One in the United States and another, once again, in India.

It was why he had come into the office so early. He had been given an enormous task and was spinning a significant number of plates.

Coordinating the assassination of the American in Jaipur had been difficult, but not impossible. The heightened tensions between China and India had drawn added attention to all of its diplomatic personnel, especially its intelligence officers.

Whether you worked at the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi, or one of the consulates in Kolkata or Mumbai, you couldn’t move without being smothered by a blanket of surveillance.

Even using NOCs—intelligence operatives without official ties to Beijing—you could not employ anyone even remotely Chinese. “Chindians”—persons of mixed Chinese and Indian lineage—existed in India, as did some expatriate Chinese, but their numbers were so low compared to the overall population that they always drew attention and, after what had happened in the Galwan Valley, were the objects of suspicion and sometimes downright hostility.

Indians were a stubborn, patriotic people. Their dislike and distrust of all things Chinese were only growing. So, Yang had been forced to adapt—but adaptation was one of his strong suits.

While he could use Chinese operatives in the United States, pretty much at will, he had recruited an exceptional, non-Chinese operative to coordinate things on the ground in India.

The excellence of his operatives was imperative, because the next steps in his plan were more complicated and required even more caution. There could be no loose ends; nothing that might trace back to Beijing.

If anything went wrong, he wouldn’t have to worry about the Americans or the Indians coming after him. His own government would put a bullet in the back of his head and send the bill to his family.

He couldn’t let that happen. Yang needed to obsess over every detail. He needed to be sure that every person he put into the field was at the top of their game, the absolute best.

And once he had done all that, he needed to pray that none of his adversaries fielded anyone better.

Because if they did, all bets would be off. He would bring every deadly tool at his disposal to bear. And he would do it without giving a second thought to the cost. Nothing was going to stop him from accomplishing his task.





CHAPTER 10


NEW DELHI, INDIA

The Indian Air Force helicopter had taken off from Sulur Air Base en route to the town of Wellington, in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu. There were a total of fourteen people aboard, including the chief of Defense Staff of the Indian Armed Forces. Twenty minutes into the twenty-seven-minute flight, all communications were lost.

Air traffic control had tried desperately to reestablish contact with the Soviet-designed Mi-17V-5 aircraft but had been unsuccessful and had feared the worst.

When calls started coming in about a fire, not far from Wellington, in the hilly, forested township of Coonoor, their anxiety mounted.

It took a local rescue crew half an hour to mobilize and cut their way through the trees and thick underbrush to get to the site. Once they did, they found the wreckage of the helicopter still engulfed in flames. There was only one survivor—a group captain of the Indian Air Force named Khattar. He was conscious, but horribly burned.

They worked quickly and carefully to remove him. Carrying him to a road at the edge of the forest, they loaded him into a waiting ambulance.

As the ambulance raced toward the military hospital in Wellington, state police officers established a cordon and waited for crash scene investigators to arrive.

Fifteen hundred miles north, in New Delhi, Asha Patel was about to leave for lunch, when the phone on her desk rang.

“The secretary’s conference room,” a curt voice on the other end of the line said. “Now.”

The Research and Analysis Wing, also known as RAW, was India’s foreign intelligence service. Established in 1968, it was structured similarly to the American CIA and had been entrusted with a very broad mandate.

At its core, RAW was responsible for gathering foreign intelligence and advancing India’s strategic interests abroad. Among its additional responsibilities, it handled counterterrorism operations, psychological warfare, and direct-action assignments such as assassinations and assisted in safeguarding India’s nuclear program.

Its premier department was also its most clandestine. The Special Operations Division, or simply “The Division” as it was referred to by insiders, handled RAW’s most dangerous and most sensitive assignments. Asha Patel was one of the Division’s top operatives.

The youngest of six children, she had been raised in a solidly middle-class family in Mumbai. Both of her parents had been college professors—her father at the Indian Institute of Technology and her mother at the Institute of Chemical Technology. None of the Patels were lacking in brainpower. In fact, her brothers and sisters had all gone into either accounting or the tech sector. Asha, however, answered a different calling.