The Gaze of Caprice (The Caprice Trilogy Book 1) (40 page)

              An
L96A1
rifle was bolt-action firing one shot at a time, with sound suppressor the rifle was more the menace.  The rifle could be fired in quick succession if the gunman was trained.  Li Tao was trained.  Two shots hit two targets in one second.  The occupants of the
BMW
were to expect an attack.  They weren’t to expect the attack would begin with them.  The two occupants of the front seat were hit in the chest with high-powered shots.  The third occupant was in the back seat.  Without much initiation he relied on instinct.  He leaned forward to inspect his front-seat colleagues.  Leaning forward gave Li Tao an unclean shot at his chest.  The cleaner shot was to the head.  His head snapped back leaving him in a vegetative state, spread out on the back seat. 

              The shots weren’t heard in the house but disturbed the mood.  The polite atmosphere brought on by a union of two Triad branches turned steely.  Everyone in the house was armed, even the two Dragon Heads.  They were the only two who didn’t have their weapons in full view.  The house had been turned into a trade show for gun collectors.  A standard
MP5
submachine gun was available as were
UMP
s, both
UMP9
s and
UMP40
s.  The inventive
Glock 30
subcompact converted to machine pistol was the most personalized weapon in the house.  The house itself no longer felt like a house but a gun bizarre.  The problem with the house wasn’t one of quantity or quality but caliber.  The Sons and Dragons had overlooked one person, Uncle Woo.  Uncle Woo had always been the most organized of all Dragon Heads.  His absence hadn’t erased the presence of organization in the Moons’ execution.  Xiaoyu had been Uncle Woo’s keen observer.  The Sons and Dragons weren’t expecting a targeted attack.  They thought a bumrush was eminent, the kind of retaliatory melee common among Triads.  The Sons and Fire Dragons had armed themselves with rapid-fire small caliber weapons.  They were expecting a fight from wall-to-wall and room-to-room.  Without walls, Li Tao could hit a number of the Sons and Dragons from his high-caliber distance.  Their small caliber weapons were enough to bark but not enough to bite the Moons.  The Moons maintained their positions out of range of the small caliber weapons.  They were just too far away.  Xiaoyu had not planned to enter the house.  He planned the kind of organized attack worthy of the Moons.  He adopted the strategy he used to survive in The Tank.  He waited while his opponents became exhausted.  The Moons stayed in the neighborhood but far from Sonny Yung’s house.  The Sons and Dragons realized the men in the
BMW
were unresponsive.  Likewise they were too smart to go to the car and investigate why the phones weren’t being answered.  Triads didn’t hold out hope for missing family members.  But the Sons and Dragons waited because they were forced to.  Xiaoyu waited as well.  Almost two hours went by and nothing happened.  Not a single shot was fired but the time was productive.  Li Tao quietly repositioned himself to take aim at the
Audi
parked across from the house.  His shots rang out in an eerie order.  Counting the number of shots was counting the number of kills. 
One
. 
Two
.  The shots were more disturbing this close to the house because they could be heard.  The sound suppressor could dampened the sound of the shots but the sound of a high-caliber rifle could not be subdued entirely.  The two Fire Dragons in the cul-de-sac were put on alert.  Although they could not hear the sounds of the rifle, the Sons and Dragons in the house heard the two muffled bursts.  When calls to the
Audi
across from the house went unanswered the Sons and Dragons had their answer.  Everyone in the house put on their best appearances but as time passed it became harder to do.  It wasn’t the time.  It was what their emotions did during the time.  Fear was useless.  They felt ready but didn’t know what they were ready for.  The encroaching melee didn’t happen.  Their numbers were being systematically dwindled—the feeling of being part of a system working against you, a cancer.  It was an unsettling feeling for any Triad branch.  Xiaoyu waited to make it last longer.  Another hour went by with nothing.  Sonny’s garage door suddenly began to go up.  The three Sons in the garage were taking shifts:  Two asleep; one awake.  They couldn’t be blamed.  There wasn’t much else for them to do.  The long periods of waiting crippled their readiness.  When the door came up they didn’t know what to think.  They were even more stunned when it stopped.  The door was only halfway up when drinks were served.  Two Molotov Cocktails flew into the garage before the door came back down.  Lin Jun was sitting on the opposite side of the
Audi
across the street from the house, controlling the garage door.  Wang Xi joined him after serving drinks to the men in the garage.   

              The
Audi
at the end of the street in the cul-de-sac was told to return to the house.  The engine was powerful giving the car a good start as it accelerated.  The car was traveling at over sixty kilometers per hour when one wheel was shot out.  As the tires erupted, a single-second switched the force of the car.  The car was no longer using its own powerful engine but gliding with inertia.  The inertia was a lot but not enough to keep the car going.  The car dragged itself to a halt under its own weight.  The shock of the abrupt stop caused the two men inside to freeze under sudden tension.  Airbags deployed.  For a few brief moments, the two Dragons in the car sat still.  Stillness was disguised as a clear shot.  Li Tao was in a prone position on top of the
Astra
now parked at the end of the street.  Without much time, he cleared the barrel of his rifle twice, hitting his mark.  He recovered his bullet casings before climbing in the
Astra
with Huang Sitian.  The
Astra
stopped in front of the
Audi A4
.  Lin Jun and Wang Xi got in the
Astra
and drove off.  The rest of the night was silent.  Xiaoyu and his Moons had left or so it seemed.  Liu Ping, Yi Le and Yu Hong remained in the neighborhood, along with the
GT
.  It was just before sunrise when the Sons and Dragons came out of the house.  Neighbors were following their usual routine but suspiciously looked on at the scene.  The night left seven people dead but the neighborhood still got sleep.  Not a shot was fired that wasn’t born of a sound suppressor.  The wild firefight being anticipated by the Sons and Dragons, didn’t happen.  An
Audi A4
was parked in the middle of the street with two dead Dragons.  It had to be removed.  Three Sons came to the car and started to push the car toward the driveway.  Two men walked down the street to the adjacent street and found the
BMW
with its three dead bodies.  They put their colleagues all in the back seat and drove the car back to the house parking it behind the
Audi
.  Last was the
Audi
across the street from the house.  It had to be stacked in the driveway behind the
BMW
.  Over twenty combined members of the Sons of the Sun and Fire Dragons stood in Sonny Yung’s driveway looking at the mess the night had made.  The
Mercede
s was still in the garage badly damaged by the fire from the Molotov Cocktails.  The Sons had been able to put out the fire before it set the house ablaze.  Yu Hong casually walked down the street in shorts and sunglasses with two letters typed into a prepared SMS message, O-K.  He saw the Sons and Dragons standing in the driveway looking at the bullet holes in the windows of the cars.  They were all relatively calm, all things considered.  Walking casually by on the other side of the street, Yu Hong sent the text message.  It wasn’t immediate.  It took a few seconds for the text message to arrive and a few more seconds for the radio signal to reach the transmitters beneath the cars.  When the signal arrived all three cars broke out into the same chorus—baritone.  The sound was deep and booming.  The two
Audis
and
BMW
exploded rocking the foundation of the house and those on either side.  Parts and pieces multiplied mid-flight into shreds of metal.  The twenty or so Triads standing in the driveway wouldn’t have wanted their bodies back.  They wouldn’t get them.  The windows of the house broke from shear force of the explosions and the walls cracked.  Ironically, everyone inside the house wasn’t hurt including the two Dragon Heads.  Ironic as well, through the night and accompanying morning Sonny Yung and Emmanuel Ao lost much of the body carrying their title of Dragon Head. 

              Yu Hong reacted hysterically as a casual observer.  He even faked a phone call to the Hong Kong Police Force.  Neighbors ran outside their houses.  Yu Hong walked casually to the
GT
parked around the corner.  He nodded at Liu Ping who was behind the wheel.  And gave a thumbs up to Yi Le in the back seat with the radio transmitter.  Liu Ping turned the car around and headed back for Hong Kong Island.

• • •

              The next two weeks were uneventful, decidedly so.  Xiaoyu gave Liu Ping the order to keep the Sheltered Ones at home in the garage on Jervois Street.  They only went out for food and brought it back to eat.  They ate and slept in the garage and they didn’t leave for weeks, all nine of them sharing the same toilet.  Xiaoyu held to his practice of keeping them in the dark.  They didn’t know if he was done or if he wanted to literally wipe the Triads from the map.  The attacks were all over the news.  The Sheltered Ones spent their days listening to the radio and playing cards to pass the time.  The Hong Kong Police Force was aware of the ongoing Triad war and made the usual promises to end the violence and make arrests.  And they made good on their promise.  Most of the members of the Sons of the Sun and Fire Dragons were arrested after the explosion.  It was impossible for their activities to be ignored.  But it left the Moons in a confusing position.  The status of their war was up in the air.  There were only two branches of the Triad family that Xiaoyu hadn’t moved against, the Golden Masters and Flying Dragons.  The Sheltered Ones couldn’t understand why they would continue with either branch.  Of the least likely branches to be involved in Uncle Woo’s murder were the Masters and Flyers.  The Flyers were the most non-existent of all Triads.  They operated under unspoken neutrality.  It didn’t earn them any respect but it was understandable.  Violence wasn’t necessarily bad for business but too much violence was.  The same couldn’t be said for too much peace.  Many Flyers were just pick up and delivery men.  There were almost no enforcers and even the Flyers themselves couldn’t say the last time they had a Jade Soldier.  Most Flyers didn’t even carry guns.  Except for the business they were in, the Flyers looked the most legitimate.  The Golden Masters were on very good terms with Uncle Woo.  He was at his favorite restaurant in their territory when he was killed.  There existed a special relationship between the Moons and Masters.  They weren’t cousins like the Sons and Dragons.  They were stepbrothers.

        Four weeks went by without a Triad killing another Triad.  Xiaoyu didn’t declare his war over but the Sheltered Ones saw themselves as having little reason to keep killing.  Xiaoyu knew it as well.  But the Moons had a natural advantage in a mob war, they shared their turf with the Hong Kong Police Force.  War or no war, their home space stayed relatively peaceful, for obvious reasons.  It became clear that the war wasn’t really over.  But there was a necessary cease-fire.  It had been almost six months since Uncle Woo’s death.  There was no way to know if his killer was already dead.  Xiaoyu stayed silent but the obvious became evident.  He didn’t know what to do next.  In the fifth week, a decision came in the form of a phone call to Liu Ping.  The same group that sold him information about the Sons and Dragons said they had some new information to sell.  The information concerned the death of Uncle Woo.  But they were only willing to trade with the Jade Soldier.  

• • •

The playful blue and yellow light tagged the dull black of the
Astra
, as it pulled up to the storefront.  The shine-less
Astra
didn’t tag back, too dull to play.  It was a little convenience store on Pine Street in Kowloon, so little it wasn’t convenient.  Two aisles were made by a shelf in the middle of the store, a store much longer than it was wide.   Xiaoyu and the others couldn’t find parking in front of the convenience store, so Liu Ping let Xiaoyu out in front of the store.  Xiaoyu walked in and saw a 20-something man with spiked hair and orange tips.  He wore a black shirt and blue jeans with chain.  Black eyeliner and lipstick accented his back-from-the-dead appearance. 

“
You’re the soldier
?” he asked.  Xiaoyu nodded.

“
See the tattoo before you believe him
,” said a voice that came from out of view.

“
Let’s see the tattoo
,” said the man with spiked hair.  Xiaoyu took off his leather jacket and removed his shirt.  Holding the jacket in his right hand and shirt in his left, he did a full turn.  When he came round he saw another young person standing in the store.  He had solid green hair—long hair—combed down the front of his face concealing one eye.  The other eye had a stud pierced through the eyebrow.  He wore deep green lipstick to match his green hair and had a ring piercing through his lip.  He wore a green tie-dyed shirt and black jeans, no chain.