Yao said, "That only makes sense if the Fourteen-K are working with the Chicoms, and that just does not track with everything I've seen or heard about the Triads."

- Ding's phone beeped. It was Ryan, and Ding put the call on speaker.

"What's up, Jack?"

"The two younger Americans, the guys I saw on the ferry, just paid their tab and hit the road."

"Good. Maybe they are calling it a night. And the two suits?"

"Still in the same place, still glancing over at Zha and company every thirty seconds like clockwork. Pretty obvious."

"Okay," said Ding. "I'm heading back in. Wait for me to take the eye, and then you can go back out front."

"Roger that," said Jack.

Chavez entered the club through the back door. It led to a long narrow staircase that descended to a hallway. Chavez passed doors to bathrooms and a kitchen area, and then he stepped back into the club, walked past Zha and his entourage in the corner, and returned to the bar. Ryan left through the front entrance and went back to the noodle shop on Jaffe and ordered a Tsingtao beer.

A minute after Ryan returned to his post he announced, "Here come the Fourteen-K. I've got close to a dozen goons who just got out of a pair of silver SUVs; they are all wearing jackets and it's eighty degrees, so I'm going to guess they are packing. They are heading through Club Stylish's door."

Yao said, "Shit. Ding, you think we should back out of the area?"

Chavez replied, "It is your call, but I am not compromised at all here at the bar, other than the fact I've been mumbling to myself every few minutes. How 'bout I just sit tight to make sure the consulate guys don't get into any trouble with all the new muscle around."

"Roger that, but be careful."

After a few moments the Triad presence increased all around Club Stylish. A dozen obvious gunmen fanned out and took up positions in the corners and around the bar.

Ding spoke softly behind his beer. "Yep . . . the new goons are eyeballing the two guys in the suits. This might get ugly, Adam; let me stick around for a minute in case someone needs to call in the cavalry."

Adam Yao did not respond.

"Ding for Adam, do you read?"

Nothing.

"Yao, you receiving?"

After a long moment, Adam Yao responded in a whisper. "Guys . . . Things are about to get really ugly."

FORTY.

Adam Yao had lowered the backrest of his driver's seat in the Mitsubishi minivan all the way back, and he lay flat, his body out of the sight line of the windows. He did not move a muscle, but his mind raced.

Just thirty seconds earlier, a large twelve-passenger van had rolled up with its lights off, forty feet away in the alley, not far from Yao's position in the parking lot. Adam ducked down before the driver noticed him in the minivan, but Adam did get a look at the man behind the wheel. He looked American, he wore a baseball cap and had a radio headset, and behind him in the vehicle Yao saw several other dark figures.

"Adam, what's going on?" It was Ding's voice in his earpiece, but Adam did not answer. Instead he reached for his backpack in the front passenger seat. He pulled out a rectangular hand mirror, and carefully raised it above the driver's-side window. Through it he could see the twelve-passenger van. It had stopped near the exit to the strip club, and the side door had opened up. Seven men slipped out silently; they all held black rifles close to their bodies, and they wore small backpacks, sidearms, and body armor.

As he lay silent and still, Ding's voice came over his earpiece yet again. "What is it, Adam?"

Yao replied, "There's a fucking A-Team back here. Not Marshals, not CIA. These guys are probably Jay-Sock." JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command, and pronounced "Jay-Sock" by those aware of the organization, was the Department of Defense's direct-action special-mission units, SEAL Team Six or Delta Force. Yao knew that the Pentagon would not send anyone else to do this job but JSOC. "I think they are about to come in through the back door, and it sure doesn't look like they're heading in to watch boobs jiggle."

"Shit," Ding said. "How many?"

"I count seven operators," Adam said.

Jack said, "There are probably four or five times that number of armed Triads in there. You need to stop them before they get slaughtered."

"Right," Adam said, and he quickly opened his door and slid out of the Mitsubishi. The Americans at the back door were facing the other direction, seconds away from moving into Club Stylish. Yao decided to call out to them, but he'd taken no more than one step when he was knocked to the ground from behind. His earpiece flew from his ear and he crashed face-first onto the wet alleyway, his breath knocked from his lungs.

He did not see the man who took him down, but he felt the weight of a knee on his back, he felt the burn in his shoulders as his arms were yanked roughly behind him, and the sting in his wrists as his hands were secured with flexi-cuffs. Before he could speak, he heard someone tearing electrical tape from a roll, and the tape was wrapped tightly around his head several times at the mouth, gagging him roughly.

He was dragged by his feet in the parking lot; he fought to keep his face from rubbing against the asphalt. In seconds he found himself on the other side of the Mitsubishi van, shoved into a sitting position, the back of his head slammed against the side of the minivan. Only then did he see that a single person had done all this to him. A blond-haired man with a beard and tactical pants, a combat vest of body armor and ammo mags and an automatic pistol, and a short-barreled rifle that hung over his shoulder. Adam tried to speak through the tape, but the American just patted him on the head and slipped a hood over him.

The last image Yao had was of the man's forearm, and his "Cowboy Up" tattoo.

Adam heard the man run off, around the van, obviously to join his mates near the door.

- Chavez had spent ten of the past twenty seconds trying to raise Adam Yao on the conference call, two more seconds cussing violently to himself, and finally the last eight seconds barking soft but authoritative orders into his headset as he walked through the strip club toward the restroom in the back.

"Gavin, listen up. I need you in a cab on your way over to our position. Wave every scrap of money on your person to get the cabbie to haul ass!"

"Me? You want me out there with-"

"Do it! I'll update you when you get close."

"Oh. Okay. I'm on the way."

"Ryan, I want you to hotfoot it around back to see what happened to Adam. Put your mask on."

"Understood."

Chavez passed several Triads standing around the bustling nightclub as he headed toward the restroom by the back door. He knew he would have to try to stop the men here to snatch Zha before they walked right into a bloodbath.

It was clear to him what had happened. The two young men Ryan spotted on the ferry and then here in the club were spotters for this team of SEALs, or Delta, or whoever the hell they were. They'd seen Zha and a manageable crew of security men sitting in a booth by the hallway that led to the back door and they'd radioed the snatch team to tell them that now was the time to make the grab.

The spotters left the area at the last possible moment, probably to get geared up and armed to take part in the hit. This was not standard operating procedure; but they surely weren't expecting a crew of 14K reinforcements to show up in that tiny time window when Zha was without coverage.

This was a clusterfuck in the making, Chavez knew, and the only way he could stop it was to get to the back door before it start- From the darkness of the hall that led to the stairs at the back of the club, a group of armed men appeared in a tight neat row, their weapons' laser targeting devices causing red pinpricks of light to move around ahead of them, dancing through the dim amber lighting of the club like the twinkling sparkles of the disco ball hanging from the ceiling.

Chavez was caught in the center of the club, too far away to stop the men but not back far enough to be clear of the impending gun battle. Just twenty feet ahead and to his right, Zha sat at a table full of his computer-crime colleagues and armed 14K gunmen. In front of Ding to his left, the lighted stage was full of naked women, and all around him, a dozen 14K sentries were standing around, most of them looming over two very uncomfortable-looking men from the U.S. consulate who, Ding was certain, had no idea a team of commandos was about to fly into the room with guns high and voices loud.

Chavez spoke into his mic, and he made a solemn announcement: "It's on."

- Chief Petty Officer Michael Meyer, team leader of this DEVGRU (SEAL Team Six) JSOC element, was second in line in the tactical train, his HK MP7 Personal Defense Weapon aimed just over the left shoulder of the special warfare operator in front of him. They broke into teams as they left the hallway and entered the nightclub, with Meyer and the first man breaking right, shining their lasers on the dance floor and the patrons in front of it.

Just to his left, two operators covered the club toward the rear bar, and directly behind him now, three of his men were taking down Zha and holding their guns on his protection detail.

Meyer felt almost immediately that his zone was clear of danger. There were strippers and a few businessmen, but the action was back by the bar and behind him at Zha's table, so he left the other SEAL and turned around to help with the takedown.

The team had hoped to execute this takedown after Zha left the club with his minders, and they had been waiting a few blocks up the street to do just that. But the two men Meyer had tasked with following Zha had reported that another pair of Americans were here, two suited and blow-dried guys from the consulate, by the looks of them, and they worried that Zha would be rushed away under heavy guard.

So Meyer exerted his execute authority to do the unexpected and snatch the target right here in the back of the club by the alley.

It wasn't anyone's idea of a perfect situation. DEVGRU normally operated with a much larger force, with better command and control and communications, and a much better sight picture of the target area. But this was what was referred to in the business as an "in extremis op," a rush job, to be sure, and the first rule of in extremis ops was to make the best of an imperfect situation.

The two-man SEAL recon team had left the building not five minutes earlier, but it became clear to Meyer almost instantly that things had changed in the past five minutes. Where he expected to see four or five bodyguards at the round corner booth, he now saw ten.

They were tough, jacketed men with short haircuts and hard stares, men standing around the table with no drinks in their hands.

Meyer then heard a shout from one of his men on the right, and it was the last thing he had hoped to hear tonight from his men scanning the crowd.

"Contact front!"

Things went bad quickly. A single 14K soldier back by the bar near the entrance was partially shielded by a group of businessmen standing there, and he took the opportunity to yank a .45 pistol from his waistband. With the protection of the cover provided by the civilians, he raised his weapon and squeezed off two rounds at the first armed gunman through the door, grazing the man once on the left arm and once squarely on the ceramic body-armor plate on his chest.

The Navy SEAL closest to the wounded operator dispatched the Chinese shooter with a three-round burst of tiny but hard-hitting 4.6x30-millimeter bullets to the forehead, blowing the top of the man's head off and over the crowd of men around him.

Within the next two seconds, throughout the strip club some twenty 14K Triads went for their guns.

And all hell broke loose.

- When Chavez found himself in no-man's-land as the firefight started, he did the only thing he could-he went into self-preservation mode. He dropped flat on the floor, rolled to his left, knocking chairs and people down along the way, trying like hell to get himself out of the crossfire between the Americans and the Triads. Along with other men who had been sitting along the raised dance floor, he made his way through the tables there and then pressed himself tight against the edge of the riser.

He wished like hell he had a pistol. He could pick off some of the opposition and help the JSOC men in their mission. But instead he covered his head as men in tailored suits and dancers in thongs and body glitter crashed on top of him, desperately trying to scramble away from the gunfire.

Through this he did what he could to maintain his situational awareness. He peered into the crazed crowd, saw pistols and sub-guns firing here and there, and heard the mammoth boom of a shotgun blast from up near the bar. The crowd looked like rats scattering in the amber lighting, with the SEALs' red laser targeting devices and the sparkle from the disco ball providing additional frantic movement to the scene.

- Chief Petty Officer Meyer realized in seconds he had led his team into a hornets' nest. He had been prepared for resistance from Zha's bodyguards, but he intended to mitigate that resistance with speed, surprise, and overwhelming violence of action. But instead of a manageable fight against an equal number of bewildered opponents, Meyer and his force of six other operators found themselves in the middle of a shooting gallery. Adding to this, the large number of civilians in the club, in the crossfire, forced his men to check their fire unless they saw a gun in the hand of one of the figures moving in the dark of the club.

Two of the chief petty officer's men had already pulled Zha over the top of the big round table in the corner and onto the floor in front of the booth. The spiky-haired Chinese man was down on his face on the ground; one SEAL jammed his knee in the back of his neck to hold him still while the SEAL's rifle scanned for targets across the club at the long bar near the entrance.

He fired two quick bursts at the origin of a gunshot near the entrance, then dropped his rifle to its sling and went back to work on securing his captive, while Meyer himself took a 9-millimeter round to the chest plate of his body armor, tipping him back for a moment. The CPO recovered, went prone on the floor, and then fired at the flash of a handgun blast back at the bar.

- Jack Ryan found Adam Yao "tagged and bagged," still struggling against his bindings next to his vehicle. The Mitsubishi's passenger door was unlocked, so Jack reached in and grabbed a folding knife from Yao's backpack, and he cut the CIA officer's wrist bindings free in seconds.

Popping handgun fire and short, disciplined bursts from automatic weapons came from the nightclub. Ryan pulled the hood off Yao and then yanked the smaller man to his feet.

Jack shouted, "Any guns in the van?"

Adam pulled the tape off his mouth with a wince. "I'm not issued a weapon, and if I got caught with-"

Ryan turned and ran unarmed toward the back door of the club.

- Chavez had found fair cover from the crossfire, flat on his face, pressed up against the side of the stage. He was completely out of view of the SEALs, and completely exposed to armed Triads who had taken positions of concealment or cover behind tables, at the long bar at the front of the establishment, or mixed between the civilians in the crowd. As the gunfire raged around him, Ding was not a combatant in this, and he looked and acted like any of the other terrified businessmen huddling in the center of this maelstrom, trying to ride out the gunfight by thinking small.

Ding wondered if the commandos would be able to make it back down the hall, up the stairs, and out into the alley before they were cut down by all the 14K shooters. Their original objective, capturing Zha Shu Hai alive, seemed out of reach from his admittedly poor view of the action.

Chavez figured that if they could exfiltrate at all, they would be exfiltrating back out through the hall and up the back staircase. He shouted into his earpiece between bursts of fire in the room.

"Ryan? If you are out back, get your ass to cover! This shit looks like it's about to spill out into the alley!"

"Roger that!" Ryan said.

Just then, a Triad armed with a stainless-steel Beretta 9-millimeter pistol crawled up beside Chavez, using the stage to remain hidden from the American commandos.

Chavez recognized that the man could make it to within ten feet of where the JSOC snatch team was positioned by the back hall without them seeing him. There, he could simply stand up and dump rounds from his Beretta at point-blank range into the men who would be more focused on all the shooters at the long bar some hundred feet away from them.

Chavez knew the young tough with the pistol wasn't going to squeeze off more than a few of his gun's seventeen rounds before he was sawed in half by return fire, but it was a good bet he'd kill an American or two first.

The 14K goon rose to a crouch, his tennis shoes just inches from Chavez's face, and he started moving closer to the commandos, but Ding reached out and grabbed the man's gun hand, pulled him off balance and then down onto the floor. Ding yanked him back behind an overturned table, fought for the handgun from the surprisingly strong Chinese man, and finally rolled on top of him, twisted the Beretta back, broke two of the Triad's fingers in his right hand, and peeled the gun free.

The Triad screamed, but his screams were lost in the gunfire and shouting in the club. Ding head-butted the man twice, breaking his nose the first time and knocking him senseless the second.

Ding stayed low behind the table, concealed from the Triads shooting up at the bar, and he dropped the magazine out of the butt of the Beretta, checking how many rounds he had. It was nearly full, fourteen bullets, plus one in the chamber.

Now Domingo Chavez had a gun.

- Chief Petty Officer Meyer's problems were compounding by the second, but he'd been in this line of work for too long to allow fear, confusion, or mission overload to take control of his faculties. He and his men would keep their heads in the game as long as they still had a pulse and still had a mission to accomplish.

Zha had been flexi-cuffed and dragged back into the hall, part of the way by his shirt and the rest of the way by his spiked hair. As soon as he was at the foot of the stairs up to the rear exit, Meyer's team began collapsing back, covering for one another as they reloaded.

Two of the SEALs had taken rounds to their body armor, but it was Special Warfare Operator Kyle Weldon who caught the first serious injury. A 9-millimeter round hit him square in the kneecap, sending him face-planting in the hall. He dropped his HK PDW, but it remained attached to his body by the sling, and he quickly fought off the pain enough to spin around so that one of his mates could grab him by the pull straps on his body armor.

Seconds later his mate was himself shot. Petty Officer Humberto Reynosa took a ricocheted round through his left calf as he dragged Weldon, and he fell down in a heap next to his buddy. As Chief Petty Officer Michael Meyer provided cover up the hallway and out into the club, two more SEALs scrambled back to grab both operators and pull them closer to safety.

Meyer slipped in the blood as he backed up the stairs behind them. He then regained his footing and centered his laser-aiming device on a 14K gunman wielding a pistol-grip shotgun, who appeared at the mouth of the hall. The American fired a three-round burst into the man's lower torso before the Triad managed to get a shot off.

SWO Joe Bannerman, nearest to the back door up the stairs and farthest from the fight, somehow managed to take a bullet in the back shoulder from a Triad who leapt out of the restroom with his gun spraying lead. The bullet pitched Bannerman forward, but he stayed on his feet and kept going, and Petty Officer Bryce Poteet blasted the Triad with a twelve-round spray of jacketed lead.

- Ryan had done as instructed by Chavez and sought cover. He'd just crossed the alleyway and dived between several reeking garbage cans when headlights from the mouth of the alley approached. It was the black twelve-passenger van that dropped off the SEALs just a few minutes earlier; no doubt it had gotten the call to come back around and pick them up.

No sooner had the van slammed on its brakes at the exit to the club when the door flew open. Jack watched from between two plastic bins as a bearded American with a bloody right shoulder raced out into the alley and began scanning for targets in the opposite direction. A second man came out and scanned with his rifle high back toward Jack and beyond.

Moments later Jack saw FastByte22, or at least someone wearing the same clothes as FastByte22. He was hooded and his wrists were tied, and he was being shoved forward by an American operator.

- Meyer was last out of the door. He spun toward the van in time to see Zha thrown into the open side door of the vehicle; then men jumped, limped, or were helped in after him.

Meyer kept his weapon trained down the staircase until the door closed, then followed his mates into the van.

As he made it into the vehicle, he spun around to check his "six" while still crawling across his prostrate colleagues.

The back door to the club burst open and two men in black leather jackets stepped out. One wielded a black pistol and the other a 12-gauge shotgun with a pistol grip.