Chapter XXIV: Quit India.
0654hrs, 9 November 2013, Manyata Tech Park, Bangalore, India.
"Ours is not a drive for power, but purely a non-violent fight for India's independence. In a violent struggle, a successful general has been often known to effect a military coup and to set up a dictatorship…A non-violent soldier of freedom will covet nothing for himself, he fights only for the freedom of his country." Mahatma Gandhi, "Quit India" Speech.
"No country is perfect. You have to make it perfect." Karan Singhania, Rang de Basanti
D.D opened his eyes at the sound of his alarm. He didn't have to get up at this time on the weekends, but he couldn't really sleep in like he used to do in his older days. The house he was staying in might have been easily at home in suburban America; white picket fences, a driveway, green(ish) lawn and even a mailbox. But despite it not being as bad as Delhi, there was still a good amount of smog blanketing the morning sky today.
He wished that the matchmaker would hurry up and find him a nice wife, but they were taking extra time with background checks, making sure that she was "pure" enough for him. Better safe than sorry then.
D.D started to sit up when someone put a hand over his mouth and slammed him back into bed.
"Mmphff!" he yelled.
"Dilip Desai?" a woman's voice said, coldly.
"Mmmpff," D.D replied.
"I thought so. You're going to answer some questions for us. I'm going to uncover your mouth now, and if you try to do anything funny, my friend here is going to slit your throat."
He turned his head to the left and saw a blond haired lady, holding a very big K-Bar knife.
"Mmphff mphff!" he nodded his head in agreement.
Amy removed her hand from his mouth and sat him back up.
"So…D.D," she asked slowly. "You speak English, right?"
"Yes…I can," he replied in Punjabi.
"Wrong answer." Mina advanced with the knife.
"Okay, yes, yes, I speak in English!" he said, dropping the communalism act.
"Let's try this again. You do speak in English?"
"Yes."
"You work for the Nakanishi Group, India as a project manager?"
"Yes, I am the project manager for the entire CSR department." D.D breathed heavily in and out, trying to remain calm in the face of a couple of stone cold killers.
"Do you know a Hao Chung?" Amy asked.
"Who?"
"Hao?" Mina said. D.D still looked a little bit confused.
"What?"
"Oh for crying out loud," Amy said in exasperation. This was turning into a "Who's on first" routine. She pulled out her tablet computer and accessed a picture of Hao Chung.
"This guy."
"No, I don't know…" D.D started to say, but the looks that Amy and Mina were giving him changed his mind. "Okay, I know him, but I heard his name was pronounced Hao Zhong, not Chung. But I haven't seen him in months or so."
"And why was he in contact with you?" Amy flipped the tablet around again and pulled up D.D's file on the radical groups and showed it to him.
D.D sighed. "I was in some money trouble after college, but I met Hao Zhong randomly at a job fair in Delhi. He helped me out with a job and then got me into the Nakanishi Group with a recommendation letter. However…"
He paused for a second, then continued on.
"…Zhong asked me for some favors. I used to be with a pretty radical crowd, yeah. But those days were behind me, I thought…when I went back to school. Zhong comes along and after helping me out, starts asking me about my more militant friends. I still sometimes keep in touch with them, but some have gone off the deep end. Like Ramesh…"
"Who's Ramesh?" Mina asked him.
"Ramesh Modi, he…he was a bit more into it than I was. I only into that type of crowd because I didn't have many friends, but Ramesh, he was a complete die hard. He was part of the local Communist Party of India (Marxist) chapter, but they were 'too conservative' for him. So when he heard about the Naxalites…he ran off and joined up with them against the struggle of imperialism."
"Where is Ramesh now?"
"I don't know, the Army drove most of the Naxalite groups underground, and I haven't heard from him in years. Zhong only wanted a contact, not how long I had been in touch with the guy."
"Alright then." Amy and Mina backed off a little and let D.D relax for a second.
"Who are the Naxalites?" Mina whispered to Amy, as they watched D.D take a sip of water next to his bed.
"They're a group of insurgents that follow a Maoist ideology. But like he said, they've been driven underground as of late. The Indian paramilitaries have really been going after them."
D.D seemed a bit more relaxed now, so Amy let Mina press him for more information. She sat down next to him, on the bed.
"Mr. Desai, have you had any more contact with Mr. Zhong? He's seemed to have disappeared and we kind of need to talk to him."
D.D sighed and looked around. Mina stared at him, but it was a kind glance, not the piercing one that Amy sometimes gave when she was talking to someone.
"He's been in trouble as of late," D.D replied. He was falling to the charm that was Mina Aino. "I've been holding some stuff for him, and he was going to contact me when I was to deliver the stuff."
"Trouble…? With who?" Mina studied D.D intently, looking at his eyes for any sense of hesitation or lying.
"I think it's with someone within Nakanishi, but I don't know for sure."
"He owed favors and stuff?" Amy interrupted. Mina looked at her, but turned back to D.D.
"Yeah, he was supposed to blow up a high school or something in Japan, but he only elected to destroy a road."
"With five girls on it." Mina remembered the fire and the flames…the screams…
"Hey, I don't know the details of it. Whatever it was, he didn't do a good job of it and he had to flee. He walked into my office one day, handed me this metal box thingy, gave me a mobile phone, and told me that he would contact me when he thought it was safe." D.D fidgeted in his bed, now uncomfortable at all these questions being asked of him.
"Did you get that phone call?" Mina pressed.
"Yeah, about a week ago. I'm supposed to meet with Zhong with the box late next month, and that I would have to meet him outside of the country, in Hong Kong. I took some holiday time and I'm, supposedly to meet with a matchmaker for my new wife but this takes priority…" He trailed off.
Amy and Mina looked at D.D, who had started to stare off into space. Mina nudged her head toward Amy and they both backed up a few meters to converse.
"What do you think?" Mina asked.
"I think we might get down to the bottom of all this," Amy said. "Artemis is still probably wondering why his link cut out again, so we'd better wrap this up soon."
"Fine. Mr. Desai, where is this box?"
"It's underneath my bed," He replied.
Mina ducked under the bed and found a metal box, about the size of an external hard drive, just a bit thicker and wider.
"Got it."
She pulled it out and tossed it on the bed. Mina took a look at it, but there appeared to be no obvious way to open it. In fact, it looked like it was made out of solid metal, bar the fact that it was hollow on the inside.
"Have you been able to access this?" Mina asked D.D.
"No, I haven't been able to open the damn thing," he replied.
"Uh-huh. Well, Mr. Desai, when did he say he was going to meet you?"
"Um, the 13th of December, in Chungking Mansions at 1200, at the entrance to the apartments on Nathan Street."
"Alright then, you can meet your…matchmaker somewhere else in Hong Kong. Preferably far away from Chungking Mansions, and maybe somewhere more fancy," Amy said.
"I…" D.D began to protest, but Amy cut him off.
"And don't say anything to Mr. Zhong…Chung…however you say his name, because, again, we need to really talk to him."
"Alright," D.D replied with resignation.
"Thanks. Oh, and we were never here and we're taking this box." Amy grabbed the box from Mina's hands and started walking toward the door to the bedroom.
"Uh…"
"Because it would be tragic to end your life if you opened your mouth," Mina said, quietly. "Really, it would."
"I get the point, please, just go," D.D said.
Amy and Mina left his house, leaving D.D sitting there in his bed.
"That was fun," Mina said, walking out the front door.
"It just keeps getting better and better," Amy replied, walking toward their scooter.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a black Toyota Qualis parked nearby that hadn't been there before.
"I see it," Mina stated, even before Amy had the chance to say something. They both ducked behind D.D's car, a large Mahindra Scorpio. Luckily for them, the occupants had not seen the two girls come out of the house.
Amy put the box on the ground and pulled out her Glock 26, just to be safe.
"Artemis," Mina whispered into her headset. "Artemis, are you there?"
"Whoops, gotta turn him back on," Amy said. She unjammed the frequency and Artemis was back on air.
"Hello? Why are all my calls getting dropped today?"
"We're here Artemis," Mina whispered. "Can you get a satellite feed on our position?"
"Now you want me to find out where you are?" Artemis retorted. "Come on, you're kind of leaving me out of the loop here."
"Artemis." Mina hissed. "Do. It."
Getting Mina mad was not one of the things you wanted to do in life. Artemis complied immediately, and brought up their location.
"I've got you located on the GPS. I'm bringing up a satellite feed now." The satellite feed was actually from a KH-13 satellite used by the CIA that had been secretly sent up last year. The CIA didn't know it, but some of the hardware that had been designed (by the Nakanishi Group no less), had a backdoor that would let the Japanese sneak in a few hours worth of intel if they really wanted it.
Both Mina's and Amy's eyepiece HUDs lit up with the live feed.
"Artemis, can you focus in on that black SUV out there?" Amy asked.
"I can try." Artemis focused the KH-13's camera on the SUV.
"Can you get a registration number or something?" Amy said. "I'd rather not poke my head out."
"I have one…" Artemis scanned the front of the car, and obtained a license number. "It's a car that has been registered to one of the office of the Chief Minister of Karnataka."
"Oh dear," Mina muttered. "This just got so much better." She peaked around the corner. The black SUV was still there.
"If they know about D.D talking to us…" Amy said.
"…They might try to kill him," Mina finished. "Artemis, is there anyone else in the neighborhood?"
"Checking." Artemis pulled the camera back and looked at the entire group of houses. "That's affirmative, I have several cars with human heat signatures blocking all the exits."
"Shit." Mina had no idea what to do. "Artemis…Can…you…uh…shit."
Amy quickly ran through a checklist of what options they could take. They could sit here and do nothing, at which point D.D would certainly be killed off, along with them. Starting a firefight in a residential neighborhood was not a good idea, and they were outnumbered by opponents who most likely had automatic weapons and body armor. If they could only get someone with bigger firepower to come in and help them…
"Artemis," Amy said after a moment of thought. "Are there any paramilitary units in the area?"
"Paramilitary? Like the police?"
"Kind of."
India has one of the largest groups of paramilitaries in the world, clocking in at about one million members in addition to the regular military. Their missions ranged from counter-terrorism, anti-drug trafficking, border patrol, counter-insurgency, riot control, special operations, and guarding politicians. There had to be some unit nearby that could be tricked into providing assistance.
"Um…um…" Artemis started monitoring traffic on the radio net, doing internet searches, and scanning through databases of all known paramilitary groups in India. Within five seconds, one popped up.
"Okay, I have one. The 108th South Indian Defence Force, formed in 2011 and stationed at the Military Police training center in Bangalore."
"How far away is that?" Mina asked. She was still looking at the SUV. No movement.
"It's…it's…"
"Artemis, how far away are they?" Amy hissed.
He gulped as he furiously typed in the directions. "They're about thirty minutes away from where you're located."
"Can you get them to us?"
"I don't speak any languages that they speak," he protested. "My English is really bad as well."
Amy sighed in irritation, but Mina reassured him. "Thanks Artemis," she said.
"Maybe I could just contact them directly," Amy said. "Just say that they're a terrorist attack underway near the tech park and that we need their help."
"Help who though?" Mina asked. "We can't tell them that we're Japanese."
Amy thought on that for a second.
"Didn't that Sudhir guy tell us we had accents like his customers?"
"Well, yeah…" Mina said, then realized where she was going with this. "His customers are American...and we have American passports…"
"…back at the apartment," Amy stated.
"Shit, how are we going to get those?"
"We'll have to bluff our way to that point," Amy said. "And you seem pretty good at doing that, Mina."
She smiled at that. "Alright then, so how do we kick this thing off?"
"We just have to hold out for thirty minutes. They can't reach this house…if he dies, Zhong will get spooked out and he'll cancel the meeting. Artemis?"
"Yeah?"
"Put me in contact with the head of police for this area and I'll take it from there," she said.
"Gotcha." Artemis started making the necessary calls to make sure this thing worked.
"We can do it quietly, too." Mina held something up from her purse. It was a suppressor.
"I didn't want a repeat of Korea."
"Nice going, got an extra?" Amy was impressed.
"Right here." She handed an extra one to her.
Mina and Amy affixed the suppressors to their Glock 26s and swung around the car to engage the hostiles in the SUV.