Rising Tiger: A Thriller (35)

The Science and Technology Commission had no research from which to gauge how severely the weapon would impact the little bastard known as the Troll. They had advised against going too strong with the initial attack. Yang, however, had instructed his operative to go with a full dose. He wanted the attack to be extremely painful and for it to leave a deep psychological scar. He wanted the little man to live in fear of it happening again. Which it most definitely would.

Yang had a plan for all of the members of the Carlton Group, but he had a very special plan reserved for one employee in particular—Scot Harvath.

Harvath had not only single-handedly disrupted several of China’s most important, highly sensitive strategic missions, but he was also suspected of recently assassinating a ranking member of China’s Ministry of State Security and one of its top operatives, who had been a former military colleague of Yang’s.

There would be quite the reward and untold accolades for whoever managed to capture or kill Harvath.

Yang’s hope was that in staging attacks on members of the Carlton Group, he could weaken the organization and flush Harvath out into the open. The man had been impossible to find.

But as much as Beijing considered Harvath a special target, the priority right now was to put a stop to any potential Asian version of NATO. Yang was free to go after Harvath on the side, but not at the expense of his primary mission. Beijing would absolutely not stand for a military alliance in their backyard anchored by the United States and India. It was a nonstarter—one they would risk anything to stop, even going to war.

That meant that the next operation was critically important. And even though he knew his man in Mumbai knew that, he wanted to drive the point home once more. He didn’t want any mistakes. Zero.

Looking at his watch, he computed the time difference. They were coming up on another communications window.

Opening his encrypted laptop, he activated the app that would encode his communications and send a signal to his contact that he was online. Minutes later, Basheer Durrani entered the chat.

He was a deep-cover operative from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI for short. Pakistan had been one of the first nations to recognize and formally establish diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China. It had also played a pivotal role in making Richard Nixon’s historic state visit to China possible.

China was Pakistan’s largest trading partner and lavished the country with massive investments, including the over $62 million worth of upgrades to Pakistan’s infrastructure, economy, transportation networks, and energy sector, via a program known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor—Beijing’s biggest overseas investment, which fell under its global Belt and Road Initiative.

Islamabad loved the money and expertise that the Chinese provided. They also loved that China hated India as much as Pakistan hated India. It was a match made in heaven. In exchange for Beijing’s largesse, Pakistan not only looked the other way when it came to the ethnic genocide of Uyghur Muslims, but actively spied on them in the northern regions of Pakistan and fed the intelligence to the Chinese.

It wasn’t lost on Beijing that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was viewed by Islamabad as Pakistan’s economic lifeline—and so China did what they did in every nation where they had gotten an investment foothold: they pushed for everything they could get in return. This went double for help in undermining and weakening India.

Beijing referred to the arrangement as a strategic intelligence partnership—a relatively benign-sounding title. What it was, in fact, was China being granted access to, and the ability to task, Pakistani intelligence operatives inside India.

In any other scenario, this would have been untenable—the geopolitical equivalent of bobbing for hand grenades. Pakistan was running Chinese operations against India. Whatever went wrong would not only blow back on China, but on Pakistan as well. Islamabad didn’t have a choice. Pakistan was simply too desperate for Beijing’s cash to say no.

It was via this “relationship” that Yang had been made aware of Durrani. The more he had dug into the ISI operative, the more he knew he wanted to recruit him. He was not only extremely talented, he also had some very dark, very compromising things in his past that would make him easier to control.

Yang wanted a full debrief on the downing of the helicopter, but then he wanted to get down to more important business—how the next attack would unfold.

For that, he had something very special in mind.





CHAPTER 22


JAIPUR

When Harvath stepped off the aircraft, Vijay Chabra—ex–Indian Police Service officer and current U.S. Embassy Foreign Service National/Investigator—was on the tarmac waiting for him. Harvath liked him the minute he laid eyes on him.

The man had swagger. He looked like he had been frozen in the middle of a stylish, 1980s Bollywood action movie and brought back to life.

He was fit for his age, which Harvath pegged to be somewhere in his mid-sixties. He was tall, with his hair parted on the left side, and he had a thick, almost porn-star-style mustache that must have been dyed, as it was such a dark shade of black.

He wore khaki trousers and a linen safari jacket, belted at the waist. His leather shoes were highly polished and he wore a gold signet ring on the pinky finger of his left hand. Capping it all off, he wore a gold watch, and a fashionable pair of dark, gold-rimmed sunglasses hung from his shirt at the neck.