Ten minutes later Pitt returned from the house loaded down with a small box of food and ten blankets. He had also hurriedly changed into more practical clothes. He failed to hear the silenced pair of bullets that smashed into the radiator of his rental car. He only caught the antifreeze flooding the ground under the front bumper when it reflected off the night-lights he'd left burning on the porch of the cabin.
"So much for driving out of here," he said quietly to Julia as she distributed what little food he had, and he passed out the blankets to the shivering Chinese.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Your friends just punctured my radiator. We wouldn't make the main highway before the engine heated up and the bearings froze."
"I wish you'd stop calling them my friends," she said flippantly.
"Merely a form of speech."
"I fail to see a problem. The lake will be crawling with INS and FBI agents in another hour."
"Too late," said Pitt seriously. "Shang's men will be all over us long before they arrive. By disabling my car, they bought time to organize a raiding party. They're probably closing off the road and forming a net around the cabin while we stand here."
"You can't expect these people to hike miles through the woods in the dark," said Julia firmly. "They can endure no m
ore. There must be another way to get them to safety. You have to think of something."
"Why does it always have to be me?"
"Because you're all we've got."
Feminine logic, Pitt mused. How do they come by it? "Are you in the mood for romance?"
"Romance?" She was completely taken aback. "At a time like this? Are you crazy?"
"Not really," said Pitt casually. "But you must admit, it's a lovely night for a boat ride under the stars."
They came to kill Pitt shortly before dawn. They came quietly and deliberately, surrounding and approaching the cabin in a well-timed and organized operation. Kung Chong spoke softly into his portable radio, coordinating his men's movements. Kung Chong was an old hand at conducting raids on houses of dissidents when he was an agent with the People's Republic intelligence service. He did not like what he saw of the cabin from the woods. The outside floodlights were on around the porch, playing havoc with the raiders' night vision. The lights of every room were also turned on, and country-western music blasted from a radio.
His team of twenty men had converged on the cabin along the road and through the forest after his advance scout radioed that he had shot holes in the radiator of the occupant's car. Kung Chong was certain that all paths of escape were cut off and that no one had passed through his cordon. Whoever was living in the cabin had to be there. And yet Kung Chong sensed all was not going according to plan.
Throwing light around a darkened building usually indicated an ambush by people waiting to open fire inside. The brightly lit yard canceled the use of night glasses. But this situation was different. The illuminated interior rooms and the loud music puzzled Kung Chong. Total surprise seemed out of the question. Until his men could gain the relative safety of the cabin walls and break through the doors, they were sitting ducks to anyone with automatic weapons as they rushed across the yard. He moved from position to position around the cabin, peering through the windows with a pair of binoculars, observing a solitary man who sat at a table in the kitchen, the only room unrecorded by interior surveillance cameras. He wore a baseball cap and reading glasses and was bent over the table seemingly reading a book. A cabin ablaze with lights. The radio turned up at full volume. A man fully dressed and reading a book at five-thirty in the morning? Kung Chong sniffed the air and smelled a setup.
He sent for one of his men who carried a sniper rifle with a scope and a long suppressor on the muzzle. "You see the man sitting in the kitchen?" he asked quietly.
The sniper nodded silently.
"Shoot him."
Anything less than a hundred yards was child's play. A good shot with a handgun could have hit the target. The sniper ignored the scope and sighted in on the man seated at the table with the gun's iron sights. The shot sounded like the quick clap of hands followed by a tinkle of glass. Kung Chong peered through his binoculars. The bullet had made a small hole in the windowpane, but the figure remained upright at the table as if nothing had happened.
"You fool," he growled. "You failed to hit him."
The sniper shook his head. "At this distance it is impossible to miss."
"Shoot again."
The sniper shrugged, lined up the shot and pulled the trigger. The man at the table remained immobile. "Either the target is already dead or he is in a coma. I struck him above the bridge of the nose. See the hole for yourself."
Kung Chong focused his glasses on the face of the man in the kitchen. There was a neat round hole above the bridge of the nose above the reading glasses, and it wasn't bleeding.
"Curse that devil!" Kung Chong snarled. No stealth. No orders quietly issued over his radio. He shouted wildly across the clearing in front of the cabin, "Move in! Move in!"
Men dressed in black materialized from the shadows cast by the trees and ran across the yard, past the car and burst through the front door of the cabin. They spread through the rooms like a flood, weapons at the ready, poised to shoot at the first hint of resistance. Kung Chong was the fifth man into the living room. He rushed past his men and burst into the kitchen.
"What manner of devil is he?" Kung Chong muttered as he picked up the dummy sitting in the chair and threw it on the floor. The baseball hat fell away and the reading glasses shattered, revealing a crude face hurriedly molded out of wet newspaper and painted sloppily with vegetable dyes.