A/N: Ownership of Chuck is curious. Consider it for a moment. Ok, moment over.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Casey easily scaled the wall around Lo Pan's estate and froze in the shrubbery on the other side. With his night vision goggles in place he scanned for the security cameras. He had to get past them without being seen in order to get to the control node and install Chuck's electronic relay to render those same cameras blind. Luckily, the cameras were designed to point and swivel to cover a swath of area. All he had to do was wait until the camera was pointed away from him and then run through the area of coverage while the camera was blind to that portion of the area. He hoped the designers hadn't timed the swings of the multiple cameras to eliminate blind spots. He watched the two cameras in front of him swivel back and forth for a few minutes and was happy to spot a three second blind spot. He waited for exactly the right moment and sprinted to the wall under the cameras. That area directly under the cameras would be consistently blind. So far, so good.
Following along the wall to a metal box set into the brick, he pulled on the handle of the small door to find it locked. He hated spending time picking an already open lock. That had happened to him enough times that he made it a habit to always check before getting started. He took out his lock pick and tension wrench and fifteen seconds later had the box open. The infrared flashlight on his chest illuminated the workings of the electronics through his NVG's. It took him a little over two minutes to install Chuck's relay. Another minute later and Chuck's voice came to his ear, "We're in, guys. Give me a second to start feeding in loops for each camera...ok...ok, this side of the building is blind to the cameras. Eyeballs still work though, guys, so heads up. Sarah, Mei-Ling, you're on." Casey smiled at that. Chuck was right. It was eyeballs that had messed them up at Alahi's compound the prior month.
The women vaulted over the wall with more grace than Casey had shown and made their way towards the house. Like Casey, they were dressed all in black and wearing vests and night vision googles. Like Casey, each had a large pouch on her hip, although Mei-Ling had one on each hip and Sarah wore a bulky backpack as well. Like a spider Sarah moved to immediately scale one wall to the roof of the mansion. Moving with catlike grace and silence across the roof, she opened the backpack, flipped a switch inside, assured herself that the status light was green, placed it by the air intake vent for the HVAC system and covered both the backpack and the intake with a heavy blanket she had taken from the backpack. She used weights she had taken from the backpack to hold the blanket edges down to the roof. She said, quietly, "It's set."
"Right," said Chuck. "Rendezvous with Casey and Mei-Ling at the south sliding door. They have it open. The cameras are already blind inside, I've fed them loops."
"Who's awake?" asked Casey.
"From what I can see, there's the guard watching the monitors, one patrolling the grounds outside and two hanging out in the kitchen. I can't tell if the monitor guy is armed, but the other two are. Why would you have a camera watching the guy watching the cameras? That's stupid. Doesn't he know what he's doing himself? Seriously..."
"Focus, Moron."
"Right, right..."
Sarah joined Casey and Mei-Ling and the three of them entered the mansion. All three had memorized the floorplan of the building.
Moments later, Chuck said, "Ok, you're approaching the kitchen."
Still using their NVGs, the three of them made their way through the house silently. Each had firearms with them, but none had drawn their weapon yet. If they could accomplish what they needed without a gunfight, so much the better.
Sarah had drawn from a loop on her belt a wooden police night stick, the kind with a perpendicular handle about a third of the way up the shaft, similar to the martial arts weapon known as a tonfa. She held it in front of her by the handle with the shorter butt end protruding beyond her fist and the longer length of the shaft running down along her forearm. Although somewhat awkward to carry around constantly, particularly in a patrol car, police officers have found this weapon to be among the most effective in their tool kit.
Both Mei-Ling and Casey wore black gloves, Mei-Ling's being particularly bulky. They moved in short shuffle steps with knees slightly bent. Their hands were held in front of them raised in a fighter's ready position, ready for anything.
As they approached the kitchen, which was dimly lit, they moved their NVG's to the top of their heads. Unaware, the two guards in the kitchen were chatting quietly in Chinese as their attackers approached. Casey gestured silently, indicating Mei-Ling and him. Mei-Ling and Sarah nodded. Casey looked at Mei-Ling and held out his black gloved fist. He raised a finger, then a second, then, emphatically, a third.
He and Mei-Ling leaped into the room. The men saw them instantly, but were too startled to mount much of a defense in time. Casey took the first man. Known as sap gloves, each of his leather gloves had six ounces of lead powder sewn into the knuckles, giving his normal strong punch the power of a sledgehammer. A straight left punch caught his unfortunate target in the gut, doubling him over to meet a solid rising right cross that knocked him unconscious immediately.
His companion tried to help by reaching out for Casey, but his arm was grabbed by Mei-Ling. The pressure plate in the palm of her glove made a connection and the charged electrodes along the fingers and palm instantly discharged. The man began to jerk and spasm as the 50,000 volt electric stun glove had the same effect on him as a powerful stun gun or a taser. After a moment, he collapsed. Casey and Mei-Ling nodded to each other and to Sarah. Casey bent to the insensate men and snapped their card keys off their belts. Only two more guards were left awake and only one of them was inside.
"Ok, Team. One left by the monitors," said Chuck in their ears.
The monitor room was not in the same direction as the room they assumed Lee was being held in, but they believed in caution. They didn't want to leave a guard awake inside the house. Sarah took the lead this time, entered the room without a sound and approached the man before the monitors with his back to the door. She swung the wooden stick on the pivot of the handle. The spinning end connected just below his ear. He slumped forward in front of the monitors without ever knowing there was someone behind him. Sarah took his card key as well.
The mansion now cleared of guards, at least awake guards, they made their way to the interior room they had pegged as the most likely room to be holding Lee. The first card key they tried worked and the door unlocked.
Mei-Ling went first. The room was dark, but from the hallway light spilling in, Mei-Ling saw her brother lying on a cot along the wall opposite the door. It was only a step or two across the room to him. She shook him gently and put a hand across his mouth to stifle any startled outcry (she had deactivated the stun gloves before opening the door). His eyes flew wide at her touch. She whispered to him in Chinese. He nodded once to show he understood the need for silence and then wrapped her in a quick hug.
Mei-Ling and her brother stepped into the hallway. He was clearly battered, with cuts on his face, but fully ambulatory. He nodded to Casey and Sarah and smiled lovingly at his sister. She motioned him in a direction. In Chinese he said, in a whisper, "Do you know where Lo Pan sleeps?"
"Yes," replied Mei-Ling, also in Chinese, "You don't have to worry. It's all the way on the other side of the house." As she said that, she gestured in the direction of the master suite. Lee Cho took off down the hall in that direction.
"What are you doing?" she hissed. "We have to get out of here."
"Yes. But not alone, Mei-Ling. Not alone," he said as he moved quickly and quietly down the hallway.
Mei-Ling looked at Casey and Sarah helplessly and grabbed for Lee's arm. Still moving in the direction of Lo Pan's suite he shook her off and said, "I have a confidential informant inside the Triad. We have to get her out or she's dead. She sleeps in the room next to Lo Pan."
Mei-Ling said to Casey and Sarah, "Shit. I'm sorry. He wants to pull out his CI."
Casey growled in frustration and Sarah said, "Oh crap..."
"I know," said, Mei-Ling.
It had taken them less than a minute to arrive at the master suite. As Lee opened the door next to Lo Pan's room, the pretty young nurse sat up in bed, instantly awake. She grabbed her phone and immediately left her bed to silently join them. Barefoot, she didn't even bother to cover her short nightie with a robe. She was ready to go.
Chuck's voice came into their ears, "Dammit. The outside man is coming inside."
"Where?" asked Sarah. "We'll go the other way to get out."
"No, he's entering through the kitchen. He'll trigger an alarm the moment he sees your work there."
"Shit. Turn on the thing on the roof," said Casey.
"Right," said Chuck.
On the roof, an electronic switch was activated when it received a coded radio signal from Chuck. The switch triggered an M-18 smoke grenade, which, in turn, triggered an XM-58 grenade filled with CS gas (a variety of tear gas). That, then, triggered another smoke grenade, which triggered another CS gas grenade and so on. All in all, there were twenty of each type of grenade in the backpack pouring their noxious contents into the air intake vent of the HVAC system.
"It's working. Put on your masks," said Chuck.
Casey, Sarah and Mei-Ling all took out gas masks from the pouches on their hips and began to don them. Mei-Ling took out her extra one and handed it to Lee, who began to put it on the nurse. Mei-Ling grimaced at that, but didn't try to stop him.
"Give us four and then get in here, Chuck" said Casey.
"Right, four minutes. Be safe, guys," said Chuck.
There was a shout from the kitchen area and a shrill alarm began to sound throughout the estate.
Casey, Sarah, Mei-Ling, her brother and the nurse, silence no longer an issue, ran through the house to the kitchen. The man who had triggered the alarm was bending over the unconscious men and looked up in surprise as their party ran in. Sarah came at him with her stick swinging. The fast-moving end caught the man's gun and sent it flying. Her arm moved in a smooth graceful arc and the end of her stick, moving in a blur, swung back the other way and caught the man on the side of his head. He collapsed as if he'd been shot.
The vents along the floor were pouring out white smoke at a prodigious rate, creating billowing clouds already filling the large room with white smoke and tear gas. While Sarah was disposing of the guard, the nurse ran immediately to the sink, grabbing a dish towel along the way. She soaked the towel and handed it to Lee, the only one of them without a gas mask. He had begun to cough and cry as his eyes started to shut with pain. He put the wet towel to his face.
Almost a dozen Triad men were running into the kitchen and towards them through the smoke. The spies knew they had to make it through the Triad men to get to the outside and get away from the estate. Sarah grabbed Lee and the nurse and shoved them brusquely into position behind her and Casey and Mei-Ling. The three spies were back to back to back with Lee and the woman huddled in the center.
The men who attacked Casey were hit with a series of punishing blows. Just about each head shot put a man down for the count. Casey's leaden fists were not the only things dropping the Triad men before him, however. One man fell to an elbow strike and another to a knee under his chin.
Mei-Ling kicked, stunned and punched her way through those men in front of her. When she could grab an enemy, he went down from the stun. But the stun gloves she wore didn't slow her down from using her skills at kung-fu to take care of other Triad men as necessary. The ones who were stunned into unconsciousness by her gloves might have been the lucky ones.
After a few moments the smoke was so thick that the fighters could barely see their opponents. Through the lenses of the masks they wore, it seemed that an arm, a fist, a knife, would just appear out of the smoke without a fighter behind it. They reacted by instinct and with maximum effectiveness.
Sarah's stick flew faster than the eye could follow in graceful, roughly circular patterns, a smooth, dangerous ballet of violence. Occasionally, she would use the long section of the stick along her forearm to block a blow coming at her, or the shorter section, protruding past her closed fist, to strike the midsection or jaw of a Triad man. Heads were a frequent target of the swinging weapon and unconscious men fell at her feet.
Although Casey fought like a bull, the women fought like graceful panthers.
None of the fighters could see very well through the smoke, but the defenders were terribly hampered by the CS gas, both being in pain and having a difficult time breathing as well. When the fighting ended there was a pile of bodies lying on the kitchen floor in front of the spies, but there had been no gunfire. Casey, Sarah and Mei-Ling gave quick glances at each other to make sure they were all ok. Grabbing Lee and the nurse, they ran for the front door to the estate.
Lee, more than the others, was relieved to get to the fresh air. Smoke and gas poured from the open front door behind them. As they watched, the Crown Vic, driving in reverse, crashed through the front gate of the estate. Its reinforced bumpers had made short work of the gate's locking mechanism.
The kid's right on time, thought Casey with approval.
Two Triad men, on the lawn with Lo Pan, drew weapons and aimed at the fleeing party. Casey drew his SIG Sauer and fired three rounds into the lawn at their feet. The men hastily took cover.
The car met them coming the other way as they were running down the long driveway towards it. Chuck said, "Someone call an Uber?" Everybody piled in somewhat haphazardly, and the car, now moving in forward gear, accelerated away from Lo Pan's estate back through the open gate leaving mayhem in its wake.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Dawn was lighting the eastern sky . "Stop. Just stop moving, please," said Fen Han. She was wearing clothes borrowed from Mei-Ling and Sarah, who were both about her size.
"I'm fine," said Lee, as she was trying to put a small bandage on his forehead and he was trying to have another bite of his second three egg omelette.
"You're fine. You're great. Just stop moving so I can get this bandage on. Please, Lee," she said.
"Ok. Ok. I'm just trying to eat here," he said, but he paused to allow her to finish, although he did finish his second glass of scotch. Casey took the empty glass and moved to refill it.
Lee was sitting at Casey's table, eating eggs and drinking scotch and coffee (but not together, of course). He had introduced them to Fen Han. Given her solicitous attitude to Lee, both Sarah and Mei-Ling thought the pretty young nurse had romantic feelings for him, although the lady spies had not compared notes on the matter.
In the Crown Vic back to Echo Park, they had gotten Lee's story. After his capture, he had been taken to a deserted building somewhere then transferred only last night to the room at Lo Pan's estate. He had been severely beaten, but not yet tortured. He had been deprived of food, but not water, since being taken, hence his appetite for Casey's eggs. He had expected torture to arrive on his agenda sometime during the day, but Mei-Ling and her American friends had arrived in time to disrupt the Triad's plans in that regard. They wanted to know the identity of his CI. He wanted to know how they had known about the meeting in the zoo parking lot. None of those questions were to be answered now.
As the newly replenished glass of scotch was put in front of him, he said, "Thanks, Casey. Actually, thank you all. I know I've said it already, but I really can't thank you enough. I'm still not sure I understand why you helped my sister..."
"Yeah. I don't either, now that you mention it," said Casey.
"Case..." said Sarah.
"What?" he asked with innocence.
"...but you saved my life and Fen's too, probably," said Lee.
"You're very welcome," said Chuck. "Mei-Ling told us that you weren't really grabbed to trade for a White Dragon Red Pole held in Hong Kong. She thought that was bullshit. Why do you think you were grabbed?"
"She's right. I'm working right now with a division of the UN dealing with, among other things, human trafficking. It's a huge illegal business now. The Triads, all of them, are heavily involved. I was trying to collect evidence against the White Dragon Triad and Lo Pan. I'd run into a brick wall until I met Fen."
"How'd you get involved, Fen?" asked Mei-Ling.
"I'm born and raised here. I went to UCLA and got my nursing degree almost five years ago and went to work for a community health clinic in Koreatown, actually, pretty near the Chinese Consulate. Some of the clinic's patients were the girls, I'm deliberately calling them girls and not women, some of the girls from one of the local massage parlors. Chinese girls from small rural towns in the interior of China. From my parents, I speak Mandarin, so I was always asked to help them. They were prostitutes. There's no other word for it. Those massage parlors were...are...just fronts for brothels. Their pimps run the businesses, but also run their lives. The girls all live together in a crazy crowded apartment some place. Sleeping on the floor most nights. Some of the men will drive them to and from work in a van, so they are never out of sight. They get barely any money of their own. They are essentially in a form of slavery."
"Why do they do it?" asked Chuck, clearly disturbed by the story. "That's horrible."
"Mostly because they don't know any better. They're young. They are almost all uneducated and unworldly. The towns they come from are poor and lacking any realistic prospects..."
"That's communism for you," said Casey with a grimace.
"We have our fair share of problems, Casey, but we're working on this," said Lee. "My country's economic progress has been record-breaking and we are proud of it, but, and we will acknowledge this, it's difficult to extend prosperity to all of China. Our east coast and, say a hundred miles inland, is booming. Further inland, though, continues to lag. Many of the people we are talking about are from those areas – both men and women. The economy there is still bad and the poverty leads to desperation. Some of these people flee to our coastal cities, but some try to come to America. The trip itself is grueling. They'll sleep in the hold of the ship, not a stateroom or anything. Cots, or just blankets on the steel deck. Inadequate, spoiled food. Dirty water to drink. The men are beaten if they complain. The women are raped."
Sarah and Mei-Ling visibly blanched at Lee's description. Even Casey growled.
"Some of the women, the unlucky ones, will end up in the sex trade when they get here. The lucky ones, and the men, end up in sweat shops. Their illegal passage costs up to $35,000 American money. Of course, they don't have it, so they pay their entire life savings, say $5,000, up front, and the balance to be paid off over time from what they will earn in America. Needless to say, that period of indenture will last for years as the Triad, in this case we are talking Triad, uses them for their own purposes. The conditions they live under are horrible. The UN is working on the problem of human trafficking generally, but it's immense."
"It was the conditions of the women," Fen continued, "that got me involved. When I saw what they were going through, I decided I wanted to help. So, I infiltrated the Triad that was running these girls."
"Holy smoke, Fen. That's so brave," said Chuck, clearing Lee's breakfast plate. "You're really...well, brave."
"Chuck's right. As awful as the situation was...is...for those girls, it takes huge courage to do what you did, Fen," said Sarah, clearly impressed by the young woman.
"Thanks, guys. Anyway, I went to bars I knew were frequented by the Triad soldiers. When they learned I was a nurse, they started to ask me for medical advice. Eventually, I was offered a job at a Triad-run clinic. I thought I would be able to get some useful stuff for the cops there. Then...and I couldn't believe it, Lo Pan himself saw me in the clinic and wanted me as his personal nurse. Of course, I accepted. That was six months ago. I've been watching and listening from his shadow ever since. When a friend introduced me to Lee, I thought it was great...that the UN could use the information I had to shut down the pipeline bringing these girls from China."
Lee picked up the tale. "It's proven harder than we assumed. They are very compartmentalized. It's so frustrating. For example, we've worked with your government to stop the freighter Golden Voyage coming in from Hong Kong tomorrow. It's supposed to dock in Long Beach in the morning and we have a hell of a reception planned for them, thanks to Fen. We've tried this twice before, though, so I don't have high hopes. The problem is that before we can get the destination country's law enforcement or Coast Guard on board the ship, the Captain wipes the computer hard drive and destroys all the evidence linking the ship to the Triad. We end up stopping one ship, but not crippling the pipeline." He shrugged in resignation. "I have a plan to deal with it eventually, but it won't work yet. And anyway, doesn't apply to the Golden Voyage."
"Why not?" asked Mei-Ling. Sarah was nodding along with Mei-Ling as she heard the story.
"It'll take me a while to set it up. I want to work a man into a position of confidence aboard one of the transport ships. He can stop the Captain from destroying the evidence and preserve it for the authorities. It will be a long-term undercover job, but we should be able to do it with the right volunteer operative."
"What's involved with protecting the evidence, little brother?" asked Mei-Ling.
"Getting ahold of the hard drive from the ship's computer before it can be destroyed. I understand that much of the communication with the ship is by encrypted email. The emails have to be downloaded onto the hard drive so they can be run through the decryption software, otherwise we could just get them from the ISP's. If we can get that hard drive, we can decrypt it and have the evidence we need against the Triad," said Lee.
"So, you really just need someone to do a black bag job on the ship before it gets to port?" asked Mei-Ling. "Steal the hard drive before it gets destroyed?"
"Sis, what are you thinking?" asked Lee.
"Just want to know. I'm already rogue as far as Beijing is concerned. How hard would it be for me to get aboard the Golden Voyage tonight? Just sneak in and sneak out. Not a major war, just a little ninja stuff."
"We don't even know where it is now," said Lee. "All we know is that it's due to arrive in Long Beach tomorrow. The Pacific is a big place to go looking for a ship."
"Why can't we get the cooperation of the American authorities?" asked Fen.
"I don't know who to trust. Somebody told Lo Pan I was meeting you at the zoo. If there's a leak, then word would get back to the Triad," said Lee.
"Guys, the location of the ship isn't an issue," said Chuck from in front of Casey's computer. "It's freely available on the web. Here, let's look at Marine Traffic dot com. It shows ships at sea. Come here, Lee. Take a look...Ok, ten or so ships named Golden Voyage...but, only one coming in to LA. There it is, guys. There's the Golden Voyage. How many people are being transported?"
"Almost three hundred," said Fen.
"Sounds like a great possibility to cripple the Triad's human trafficking operations, if we could do it right," said Casey.
"So, Lee, just so I understand. You could use an operative or two to board the ship before tomorrow morning and secure the computer hard drive, so that it can be turned over to the Coast Guard or FBI when they raid the ship tomorrow? And that may help shut down the Triad's human trafficking pipeline? Ok. Sounds like fun," said Sarah. She turned to Mei-Ling and said, "You in?"
"Sounds like fun," Mei-Ling said with a grin.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
An hour later, after some serious planning, Chuck and Sarah had gone to his apartment to sleep for a few hours. Lee and Fen had taken Casey's second bedroom to get a few hours rest as well. Mei-Ling insisted that the couch was perfectly adequate for her as she was shoo'ing her brother and Fen into the other room.
Casey was in his bedroom and had just taken off his shirt when there was a knock at the door. "Come in."
It was Mei-Ling. Casey said, "I told you the couch sucked. I'll take it. I can sleep anywhere. You take my bed." He moved to head past her back to the living room, but she put her hand lightly on the large, flat muscles of his bare chest. With the other hand, she closed the door.
"You fight very well, just Casey," she said softly, standing a little inside his personal space and looking up at him. "I was very impressed at Lo Pan's place."
"Thanks. You too. I know you kick pretty hard." He smiled slightly and rubbed his jaw where she had clocked him the night before.
She put her hand lightly on his jaw where she'd kicked him and said, "Do you do anything else that well, just Casey?"
He smiled a small smile, and said in a low, somewhat husky voice, "Just about everything."
"Oh, good," said Mei-Ling and kissed him.
Sleep is overrated anyway, he thought.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
A/N2: The sap gloves are real and may even be legal where you live. The stun gloves aren't real. I found similar designs and a few DIY projects to make them, but couldn't find an actual, working, for-sale pair. However, I figure they require less of a suspension of disbelief than a computer in a guy's head.
A/N3: Ok, let's talk about the smoke/gas attack through the HVAC system. After 9-11 a number of commercial office buildings "hardened" access to the HVAC air intakes, worried that bad guys could feed a noxious gas of some kind into an otherwise sealed building, so this is a real thing. But...what I described wouldn't work. I could go into a long explanation of why not, dealing with CFM's (cubic feet per minute, the measure of the rate of airflow through an HVAC system), types of air filters, the relative proportion of particulate matter versus actual gas in both military smoke and CS gas, and other techy stuff like that (not to mention the Beverly Hills Fire Department, of course). If I did that, though, you guys would probably just roll your eyes and mumble, "there he goes again." So, just trust me on this one. What I described wouldn't work. Pretty cool, though, huh?
A/N4: Oh, and CS gas is way more debilitating than I've shown. The Triad guys would not have been able to fight.
A/N5: My description of the circumstances of the illegal immigrants is, so far as I know, accurate (though, of course, incomplete). I don't want to venture into politics here. It is neither the time nor the forum for that, but I do have to say that the traffickers, the people actually moving the illegal immigrants/refugees/migrants from one place to another, are often bad people taking vicious advantage of the truly desperate (whether walking them through the baking deserts of the American southwest, packing them into freighters across the oceans without adequate food or water, or, more recently, loading them onto deliberately unseaworthy boats in the Mediterranean). Whatever your feelings about illegal immigration, I think those parasites deserve our condemnation.
A/N6: That's a real maritime website Chuck found and it's pretty interesting to check out.
A/N7: Thanks for all the reviews, PM's and support. Keep it up. You guys rock.