East Meets West Pt. 01 Ch. 01

She walked up to me, looked at me for a minute, and then slapped me -- hard!

"Why you not take shot, you stupid, stupid man?" she demanded in heavily accented English, "You should shoot me, you should kill me!"

Then she began shaking, and tears started streaming down her face, leaving tracks through the sheetrock dust. I think she had probably just realized how very close she had come to dying, either at my hands or the hands of the two men upstairs.

She threw her arms around me.

"Thank you for not kill me! But you still stupid, stupid man," she sobbed.

As her arms tightened around me and my upper right arm, I flinched and gasped in pain.

She stepped back, then grabbed my right hand. By now blood was running down my arm and dripping off my hand onto the porch. Actually a lot more blood than I had first thought.

"You shot?" she asked.

When I nodded, she started pulling me inside the house. When I began protesting that we had to get away and we could take care of my wound later, she again told me I was "stupid, stupid man. You bleed, I fix!"

Once inside she helped me remove my camo jacket, shirt and t-shirt. The safe house had enough medicine on hand that it could nearly have qualified as a small pharmacy. As she began treating my wounds, she begin to talk and explain what had happened upstairs.

After locking the door to the bedroom, she had run into the bathroom where she knew there was a cast-iron tub. That bathroom served two bedrooms. Taking refuge in the tub, she waited until the shooting had stopped, then ran into the next bedroom.

She still had both pistols, and her plan was to wait until they kicked in the door of the first bedroom, then dive into the hallway and open fire.

She said that one of my shots had killed one of the men, but the second round missed. Both of the surviving men, however, were concentrating so intently on the first bedroom, that they failed to hear her open the door of the second bedroom.

Firing both weapons, she had quickly killed both men. She also found a knife in one of their pockets and cut the zip-ties.

She had just made her way downstairs when I called out.

I was simply amazed at both the courage she had shown, and the presence of mind she was still showing.

She had been taken prisoner by six men, handcuffed, slapped several times, had her dress ripped off, saw two men killed right in front of her, killed two more by herself and was now treating my wounds about as calmly as could be.

Yes, her hands were shaking a little, but they were still fastening the bandages with swift, sure motions.

Once she had finished, I said "Thank you."

It was at about this point when both of us realized she was naked, except for a pair of panties!

Okay, okay, that is obviously a lie on my part.

Even as she had been talking, I had been VERY aware she was almost naked. And beautiful.

She suddenly blushed, and became flustered for a minute.

I simply handed her my shirt -- which was about 10 times too large -- and she quickly slipped it on. The fact that one sleeve was covered in blood apparently didn't bother her. Of course SHE was still covered in blood and brains herself!

I introduced myself, and asked for her name. Then I questioned her about why she was at the safe house, about the six men we had killed, and what had happened to the security detail.

Her name was Jiao, which I later found out means in Mandarin, "delicate, tender and beautiful." She was certainly beautiful, but her actions and composure so far tonight did not really indicated either delicate or tender. If I had known a Mandarin Chinese word for both strong and tough as nails, then I might have started calling her that.

She had been at the safe house for a week, being debriefed following her defection to the United States. She was a nuclear physicist, which meant I again had to revise my estimate of her age.

When I first saw her through my scope I guessed she was about 13 or 14. I immediately revised that to about 18 or 19, but now I was guessing she must be 23 or 24.

Jiao and the two members of the debriefing team (one man, one woman) had been eating a late meal when Colonel Shin, with the Ministry of State Security (MSS), had walked into the house holding a pistol. I knew MSS was roughly equivalent to the old Soviet KGB -- one of the deadliest and most feared agencies in the world.

"He knew their names," Jiao said, which startled the hell out of me.

"Not only their names, but names of guards, and schedules," she added.

I now knew this was a lot bigger even than the breach of a safe house, deep inside the United States.

For the MSS to know the location of a safe house was one thing, but to also know who was heading the debriefing team, know the guard's names and even their schedules meant he had to have a source deep within the U.S. Intelligence community.

"We need to get the hell out of here -- Now!" I warned her, "but first I have to try to destroy all evidence of what happened here tonight."

That was when Jiao told me the Colonel was also planning on destroying the house, and had brought a lot of plastic explosives with him as well.

While Shin was holding Jiao and the debriefing team at gunpoint, another member of the team drove an SUV up beside the house. The explosives were still in the SUV.

Jiao and I ran outside to the SUV and grabbed everything we could, and I began placing explosives throughout the house, attaching a remote controlled detonator to each one. That was one advantage to dealing with professionals -- they had brought everything they would need, and now everything I would need, with them.

I also found a large propane tank mostly buried outside. Since there were no natural gas lines in this part of the mountains, the only heating options during winter were wood or propane. I placed one charge directly on top of the propane tank.

Jiao also helped me drag the body of the dead MSS member inside the house, since one of my arms was now almost useless.

She had also told me that the other members of the MSS team had already put the bodies of the three security guards, plus both members of the debriefing team in the basement. That meant there were now 11 dead bodies inside the house, five Americans and six Chinese.

From what Jiao was now telling me, Colonel Shin had told her that if she did not let his men handcuff her, then he would shoot the two debriefers.

"But once they handcuff me, he just shoot them," she said, "didn't ask questions, just shoot."

Once we had the explosives set, I told Jiao to go get extra clothing for herself and very quickly she returned with a small overnight bag. She had also taken a moment to wipe the worst of the blood and sheetrock dust from her face.

I also used the time to virtually empty the "pharmacy" into another bag.

Within 10 minutes, Jiao and I were a half-mile away, on top of the ridge between the safe house and my house.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out their digital detonator, and activated it.

The tremendous explosion nearly knocked us both off our feet, and an enormous fireball filled the night sky. From half-a-mile away I could feel the heat.

We stood on top of the ridge for a few minutes, just looking at the incredible carnage.

I knew that, even as remote as we were, an explosion of that size, along with the fireball, would soon have every emergency and law enforcement unit in the county on their way.

Then Jiao reached over and held my hand. She was now shaking a lot more!

Finally I turned to her and again told her that we "need to get the hell out of here."

Still holding hands, we started down my side of the mountain. My side was a lot steeper, with more treacherous footings, so I continued to hold her hand as I helped her make her way downhill.