Without Warning Read online

  After all, the golden rule, as told by Soviet leadership, was to do unto others before they can do unto you.

  The Russian people would clamor to send their sons and daughters to die in a foreign land, this time on Amerikan soil.

  Because a lie… any lie, told often enough… becomes indiscernible from the truth.

  -4-

  Colonel Sagalevich joined his men below deck to give them their pre-departure pep-talk.

  The noisy chatter among them came to a screeching halt as he came into the room.

  He barely had to raise his voice to make himself heard in every corner of the room, for his men gave him the courtesy of an absolutely noiseless audience.

  Between his words the only thing one could hear was the purr of the water rushing past the hull.

  “The ship’s captain has turned the boat toward land,” he started. “Today you will take your first step on Canadian soil, and will make your way to your rendezvous point over twelve hundred kilometers away.

  “It will take some of you a couple of months to get there.

  “Some will take longer.

  “It is imperative you remember your orders. All of them. Especially the ones you do not wish to follow.

  “No one wants to die on foreign soil. No one wants to take their own life, or to leave words to one’s family unsaid.

  “But you are Russian heroes, and the survival of the Motherland is so much more important than your own.

  “We have taken great care to strip you of anything which identifies you as Russian. The gear you have on is common to Canadian hunters. Your weapons are deer rifles which can be purchased in any sporting goods store in Canada. Before the invasion they will be exchanged for combat weapons which have already been smuggled into the rendezvous area.

  “The food packs you carry with you are also common to the area, as are the ones you’ll receive from our support people along the way.

  “In short, there is nothing about you which will give you away except for you yourselves. Few of you speak French or English, and those of you who do speak it with a Russian accent.

  “That is why it is imperative that you avoid contact with the locals at all costs. You are to stay in wooded areas at all times and travel only at night. During the daytime you are to camouflage yourselves or hide in caves or beneath branches and leaves. When it becomes necessary to cross roads or unforested land you must do so with extreme care.

  “If you are spotted, you have only two courses of action. You must either kill the people who have spotted you, or you are to kill yourself. There are no other choices.

  “I have listened carefully to the chatter over the past several days. I have heard the whispers. I am well aware that some of you are missing your loved ones.

  “We have talked about this many times before, but I will mention it one last time. I want the echoes of my words to ring in your ears and keep you constant company as you make your way overland to the rendezvous point.

  “The Motherland has no place for cowardice.

  “Those of you who do not show up at your checkpoints will be hunted down like mangy dogs and shot as deserters. Furthermore, you will be reported to Red Army Headquarters as such. Your families will be shamed. They will be outcasts in their villages and their communities.

  “Their rations will be diminished. Their stipends will be cut. Their medical services will be discontinued. They will wind up hating you for the pain you will cause them.

  “On the other hand, those of you who show up at your checkpoints on time, those who make it to the rendezvous area on time and take part in the great invasion… you will return to the homeland and be greeted as conquering heroes. You will hold your heads up high and grow old sitting in the parks, feeding the pigeons and telling the little children of your heroic exploits. You can tell the children how you severed the head of an Amerikan soldier and held it high for all your comrades to see. You will earn that right. And you’ll also earn the right to shove the families of the deserters out of your way and to spit on them as you walk to the park each day.

  “Do this for Mother Russia and for your own mother.

  “Do it for yourself.”

  An outsider looking in might find some flaws in the colonel’s words.

  Like, for example, if a soldier failed to report at the checkpoints, and he was immediately branded a deserter and traitor, was that really fair? After all, what if he was a loyal soldier who was spotted and who immediately shot himself to keep from being exposed as Russian? Was it fair that his family be shamed and starved after he gave his life for the hammer and sickle?

  Russian soldiers, though, were like the soldiers of most communist countries.

  They didn’t look for inconsistencies in their nation’s doctrine or their propaganda. They accepted without question their glorious leader’s words as gospel. In many cases they become zealots, ready to follow their fellow countrymen off cliffs in the name of their country.

  Hitler had his Fatherland; Stalin had his Motherland. And each of them buried countless souls who died needlessly.

  And would again.

  None of Colonel Sagalevich’s soldiers – not a single one – questioned what they were about to do. But his words worked them into a lather, a group of men ready to kill every last American for their country if possible, or to die themselves if called upon to do so.

  They say war is hell. But it’s also a terrible waste.

  By the time the first officer flipped a switch which changed the light below deck colors, bathing the cargo bay in a rich green, the group of four hundred was… singing.

  They started with a classic Soviet marching song, A Soldier is Marching in the City. The song was joyful and full of promise, talking of pretty girls and a jubilant victory.

  Then the mood turned more somber as they rendered a very noisy and very off-key version of Here, the Birds Do Not Sing Anymore.

  When the green light came on they abandoned the song midway through and broke into an impromptu version of the Russian national anthem.

  They were ready to fight.

  They were ready to die.

  Above deck the big boat had gone into stealth mode. All lights were doused. Everything electronic was turned into standby mode, except for radar jamming equipment.

  Some of the modifications the boat had undertaken while in dry-dock gave it the capability to disappear completely from other ships’ monitoring equipment.

  At night, as long as its crew remained below deck or under shelter, it had no heat signature. It could not be spotted from the air, except by night vision cameras. And the Canadian Coast Guard had precious few aircraft equipped with such.

  None of them flew patrol along the coast of British Columbia.

  The vessel snuck into Cook Trough and anchored half a mile from the coast. Eight rubberized fast boats were lowered into the water and over the course of three hours shuttled the men ten at a time to dry land.

  By daylight they’d split up and were making their way, in groups of three or four, through the darkened woods. Their first checkpoint was over a hundred kilometers south and east, in the woods due north of Vancouver and in the shadow of Mount Albert.

  It would take most of the teams months to finally get to their final destination.

  The four hundred from this load would join almost a thousand who were already there.

  -5-

  January 5, 1719 hours local

  2714 Vista Terrace, Winter Gardens, California

  Walter “Wally” Wahlberg was a mess.

  He’d always been a wreck of a human being, in that his entire life had been a series of one sordid crisis after another. He’d always been a shady character, devoid of any sense of empathy, who took advantage of everyone he could for his own personal gain.

  He never really felt bad about anything he did, just when he was caught doing it. And he’d been caught a fair number of times and had served a fair amount of prison time.

  Still, in all the y
ears he made the lives of others miserable, he himself seldom felt karma’s wrath.

  Sure, the justice system put him behind bars occasionally, but those were just temporary setbacks.

  This, though… this was different. And for the first time in his miserable life he’d been thinking about putting a gun to his temple and ending it all.

  Wally, you see, had some peculiar proclivities.

  One was that he enjoyed spending time with prostitutes. Asian prostitutes in particular.

  That in itself was sad, but not uncommon. A lot of men party with prostitutes and hang out with hookers.

  No, Wally’s biggest problem was that after he finished dallying with his prostitutes he enjoyed killing them. And society tends to frown on that.

  For several years Wally worked for a large shipping magnate in Beijing, of all places.

  That made it easy to find Asian hookers.

  The job paid quite well. Well enough to allow him to lease a rather large estate on three acres of land, on which his two Doberman Pinschers had free run.

  That made it easy to dispose of the hookers’ bodies.

  The estate had a full kitchen, you see. One which any chef would be proud to ply his trade in. It also had one of those fancy meat grinders that was bolted to a butcher block work table.

  Wally got quite good at dismembering his prostitutes in the bathtub and cutting the meat from the bones.

  The meat went through the grinder and was fed to his dogs, but only after it was mixed with finely crushed bones and teeth.

  Dobermans have veracious appetites, and a typical ninety pounds of prostitute turned into dog food took the dogs ten days to two weeks, tops, to disperse here and there over the two acres.

  Of course dog poop doesn’t hang around forever.

  It, like everything else, degrades and eventually disappears. The finely ground teeth and bones eventually fell onto the grass, then onto the soil, then beneath it.

  It was as though Wally was a magician who could make the women disappear forever, as though they never existed at all.

  Wally knew that in the United States ladies of the night were typically highly mobile. They drifted in and out of cities and when they disappeared nobody missed them. Even when police found their bodies their cases typically went right into the cold file.

  It wasn’t that the police didn’t care.

  It was just that, with most police departments, resources and manpower are severely limited. Cops cannot get everything that’s expected of them done, and therefore have to prioritize their workloads.

  Dead prostitutes, unfortunately, are ranked relatively low on a homicide detective’s priority list. Right in there with dead drug dealers and dead homeless people.

  It’s a sad reality of American life. And no, it’s not right.

  But it is what it is.

  Wally, when he moved to the Beijing office of his corporation for a few years, assumed that cops were the same all over the world.

  He assumed that police departments in Beijing were also on tight budgets and spent most of their Chinese Yuan working on cases involving decent and upstanding people.

  Not the dredges of society like prostitutes.

  Communist countries are sometimes called “police states.” And there’s a reason for that.

  Wally got overconfident. He got cocky. He made a big mistake.

  He learned, when it was far too late, that the police state he was living in had cameras everywhere.

  Spies too.

  -6-

  The thing about the Chinese, though, is that everything they do has a political angle.

  In America, and most other noncommunist nations in the world, when someone notices a crime, they treat it as a crime.

  Not so in China.

  In China, a political commissioner is in the loop in everything that happens. Even, unfortunately, when it happens behind closed doors.

  When a crime is committed in China the political commissioner finds out about it early on. And he has the authority to squelch the investigation before it really gets started.

  Any crime committed by a foreigner is especially valuable, and there is nothing more juicy than a major crime committed by an American.

  For once a major crime is committed in China by an American, he is forever owned by the Chinese government.

  He is, for the rest of his natural life, subject to blackmail by the Chinese.

  He is, to use a common (and slightly offensive) American term… China’s bitch.

  Wally had murdered and disposed of four Beijing prostitutes when a detective came knocking on his door.

  But not to arrest him.

  He just wanted to talk.

  “Hello, Mr. Wahlberg,” he said by way of introduction. “My name is Yeo Wang. I represent the People’s Republic of China’s Bureau of Foreign Personnel Relations.”

  He could have passed for an American, were it not for his apparent Asian features. He had not a hint of an accent and a perfect command of the English language.

  Wally had never heard of the federal government’s “Bureau of Foreign Personnel Relations” or what it was all about. But he assumed it was a business matter and treated his visitor accordingly.

  “Greetings, Mr. Yeo. It’s nice to meet you. How may I help you?”

  “Oh, I assure you, Mr. Wahlberg, it is I who has come to help you.”

  “Please, Mr. Yeo. Call me Wally. Everyone else does.”

  He smiled broadly, expecting to win this man’s friendship as easily as he did other Chinese businessmen.

  Yeo was not moved. He was as stoic as a statue, as icy as a snowman.

  “Mr. Wahlberg, it’s come to my office’s attention that you are involved in some rather… shall I say… disturbing activities.”

  Wally was unnerved, but not to a great degree.

  After all, this man wasn’t a cop.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then let me show you, Mr. Wahlberg.”

  The little man in the gray suit produced a computer tablet, and he opened a pre-loaded slide show.

  He started the slides, then placed the tablet on the table between the men and turned it toward Wally.

  As Wally looked down, his jaw dropped and he turned white as a sheet.

  Before him, timed to change slides every eight seconds, were several faces which were familiar to him.

  The first two were police mug shots of the first prostitute he killed. Several different mug shots of the same woman. She’d obviously been arrested several times in recent years.

  Subsequent shots showed she and Wally having dinner together at a local restaurant, something Wally always did with his victims to help them relax and let down their guard.

  Photos showed the two of them getting into Wally’s sedan. The sedan turning into the estate’s driveway, with both of them clearly visible. The sedan leaving from the same driveway later, this time with only Wally in the driver’s seat.

  Next came similar photos with Wally’s second victim.

  With each new series of photos Wally felt more and more alone in the world. More and more that his life as he knew it had come to an end. And more and more, he felt the urge to pee, another trait common of a guilty man under intense interrogation.

  The thing was, though, that Mr. Yao wasn’t interrogating him. Mr. Yao wasn’t speaking at all. He was merely sitting back and watching Wally sweat.

  And he seemed to be enjoying it.

  By the time the series of photos showing his last victim was nearing an end, Wally knew he had to say or do something.

  He just didn’t know what.

  Out of desperation he tried to be indignant.

  “What is all of this supposed to mean?” he demanded. “What is it you’re trying to prove?”

  They were polar opposites, the two men sitting across the small table from one another.

  Wally was in full-blown panic mode, visibly shaken and desperate to get out of there and go somewhere… anywhe
re… where he didn’t have to face his mysterious visitor and the slide show.

  Mr. Yao, on the other hand, was the epitome of coolness.

  His face never changed expression; he said absolutely nothing in response to Wally’s outburst.

  He merely raised his hand.

  The universal symbol for “Hold on just a second, we’re almost done. Then you’re my bitch, you hideous bastard, because I’ve got my hands around your neck and I’m getting ready to start squeezing.”

  And there, after the last photo of his last victim, was another, quite different, series of photos.

  The first showed Wally’s dogs, behind the iron gate leading into his back yard. They were snarling and barking and obviously in a tizzy about someone getting close to the gate.

  Subsequent photos were taken with a telephoto lens from an adjacent rooftop. They showed Apollo and Zeus, his dogs, romping through the yard in play. Sitting together beneath a shade tree. Tugging on opposite ends of a rope toy.

  And pooping in the yard.

  If Wally thought he had any way out of this he gave up hope when one photo zoomed in and captured… a fresh and still steaming pile of dog excrement atop a blanket of freshly fallen snow.

  They knew it all.

  His life really was over.

  -7-

  The Chinese were remarkably thorough.

  It turned out they’d been comparing notes with the Russians for years about how to trap and then handle foreign “assets.”

  That’s how both of the communist nations referred to them: foreign assets. As though they were nothing more than merchandize which could be purchased or traded or used in any number of other ways.

  What they really were, were people. People with problems, or bad habits, or deviant tendencies.

  People who could be blackmailed.

  Not for cash, for China and Russia had plenty of that.

  No, these were people who were guilty of certain things which might cost them their freedom or embarrass them, or cause their countries to take away their security clearances.