The Noah Reid Action Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (plus special bonuses) Page 5

  “The plane’s coming. It’s almost here,” shouted Abby.

  All spun their eyes to focus on the plane crawling toward them. It seemed like an eternity to the young, screaming girls who hadn’t seen their mothers for seventeen days.

  Suddenly, BOOM! BOOM! The plane exploded! Instead of a plane on the tarmac, there was a long cylindrical inferno burning out of control. Pandemonium burst inside and outside the terminal.

  Olivia screamed, “Mommy! Mommy!”

  Garret held her close to his chest.

  Abby dived into Tommy’s arms, sobbing. “No, that’s not Mommy. It’s not Mommy! That’s the wrong plane.”

  BOOM! The plane split in half.

  BOOM! The plane exploded into smithereens.

  Garret looked at Tommy, both worried, suspicious and afraid. They knew it was not the wrong plane. It was exactly the right one. They both knew it, but damned if they were going to say anything to anybody at any time.

  An explosion of this magnitude had likely destroyed everything, including the supposedly indestructible black box. But, even if the flight data recorder survived, it would never be found.

  With Tommy standing beside him, Garret knocked on the door of the Good Shepherd School.

  George opened the door and arched an eyebrow at the sight of two well-dressed middle-aged men. They were definitely not the down-and-outers that might normally show up. “May I help you?”

  “We’d like to speak to Master Wu, please,” said Garret.

  “He’s meditating.”

  “It’s urgent,” Tommy added. “And we need privacy.”

  George surveyed his visitors with fresh eyes. There was a disturbance that he didn’t notice when he first answered the door. “I understand. Please come in.”

  Inside the closed bedroom, Master Wu, Garret and Tommy sat cross-legged on the floor. Master Wu’s face remained emotionless as Garret and Tommy poured out their painful story. Even though it had been years since he had seen them, they were still his students and he would never abandon them. Master was still master, and disciple was still disciple.

  “We should have listened to you,” confessed Garret.

  Master Wu shook his head. “What is done is done. Regrets serve no purpose. What is important is to preserve the living.”

  “We want to go after Chin, and we need you to help us,” Tommy stated emphatically. “Now.”

  Master Wu shook his head again. “Patience. Now is not the time. Your daughters need you. Who will take care of them if you are dead?”

  “When then, Master Wu?” Garret asked.

  Master Wu was firm. “Not until your daughters are grown and can fend for themselves if you are not here.”

  Gazing down at the cups, Master Wu poured some tea for Garret and Tommy. “And the two of you have to go back to work for Chin.”

  “What?” exploded Garret.

  “That’s crazy,” said Tommy.

  “Can you defeat Chin now?” asked Master Wu, not really needing them to answer.

  “We can never amass what is needed to battle Chin,” exhaled Garret. “And look at us. Tommy has eaten half of Hong Kong, and I haven’t done anything to keep in shape since law school.”

  “Which is why you need to go back to work for him. If you don’t, don’t you think your daughters would be next?”

  Garret tapped his little Chinese teacup on the table, then stopped. “I can’t do it.”

  “If you don’t wait, then both you and your daughters will die.”

  Garret exhaled. He knew Master Wu was right.

  “What do we do for fifteen years then?”

  “You train.”

  “Won’t work for me. If I go back, eating and drinking is about all I do,” said Tommy.

  “How about you, Garret?”

  Garret’s voice hardened. “I could make time. No, I will make time if that’s what it takes.”

  “Good. We start training again after we finish tea.”

  “But by then, I’ll be over fifty. I couldn’t keep up with Chin. He hasn’t let up, and I’ll never catch up with him.”

  “Not you,” said Master Wu. “I have someone else in mind.”

  They heard the slamming of a door closing on the outside of the bedroom.

  “Noah, what happened to you?” they heard Mary scream.

  They heard a teenage boy brag, “You shoulda seen the other guys. Bam. Bam. Bam!”

  “Fighting’s not excusable, son,” said his mother sternly.

  Master Wu, Garret, and Tommy stood up. Master Wu opened the door and the three saw a scrawny thirteen-year-old boy with one helluva shiner lying on the couch.

  Mary, carrying an ice pack, shook her head. “Master Wu, what am I going to do with Noah? He’s getting into all kinds of trouble with the things you teach him.” She put the cold, plastic sac on Noah’s bruised eye.

  “I promise, Master Wu, I didn’t start it. Honest. They were stealing Jenny’s buns, you know the lady with the cart down the street. You know how hard she works. I couldn’t let them get away with it. Right? Right?”

  “Not exactly right, but it’s a start.” Master Wu glanced at Garret and Tommy. He saw Garret’s breaths quickening and could sense Tommy’s body stiffening. He winked. Noah is the one.… Trust me.

  Then, the sifu’s eyes sparkled as his focus returned to Noah.

  IN MY OWN WORDS

  Noah and Me

  At the end of EVIL RISES, we left Noah as a little boy. BETRAYED, the first full novel in the series, begins after Noah finishes law school, so what happened during those twenty years? And how did his family wind up as missionaries in China in the first place?

  IN HIS OWN WORDS has Noah telling us about himself. He’s still pretty innocent and has no idea of the madness that’s in store for him.

  In His Own Words

  Hi. I’m Noah Reid and you’re not.

  Sorry for the bad joke. I can’t take myself too seriously but when my good buddy Wes Lowe asked me to talk about myself, I couldn’t say no. Especially, when he promised me a bottle of single malt!

  So, here goes.

  I come from a few generations of Bible thumpers. Oops. I meant missionaries to China.

  My great-grandfather, Calvin Reid, had been a coal miner in the Midwest and was a hard drinkin’, hard livin’ kinda guy. However, a miracle happened when he heard fiery preacher Billy Sunday preach in 1929. Up until then, Calvin stayed far away from church. But when Billy preached in plain colorful language, whirled like a dancing dervish, Calvin “walked the sawdust trail” to the front of the hall. From what I’ve been told, the bigger miracle was not that great grandpa became a Christian but that he gave up his half bottle-a-day of moonshine.

  Then the Depression hit. With food and money tight, Calvin decided to go to China in the 1930’s. How he was able to afford to bring himself, my great grandmother, Mabel, and their five kids to Shanghai is a mystery. From there, they settled in Hehua (River Flower), a small rural town of about five hundred people, about a hundred miles away from the big city.

  It was nuts in this village by the river, almost as crazy as Calvin’s decision to come. The only Chinese he and the family knew were from the menu of the local restaurant, the Bamboo Dragon. Chow Mein. Ke Jup (ketchup.)

  Suspicious of the fledgling missionary, none of the Chinese wanted to hear about the “white man’s god,” especially in Calvin’s broken, elementary Chinese. But Calvin and Mabel were patient. Calvin worked alongside other villagers in ankle-deep mud of the rice paddies and helping build their homes with brick and mortar.

  Mabel, a teacher, taught arithmetic and English, not just to the children but the adults. After daily homeschooling of her own children, up to thirty villagers would gather into the village square to be taught the ABCs and the one, two, threes. By being part of the community, people began to trust the American family, taught them Chinese, and invited them into their lives. Three years after they arrived in Hehua, Calvin had his first convert.


  At the beginning, it was culture shock for the kids. They kids hated the food, lack of toilets, lack of electricity, lack of anything related to civilization. And like most young people, they really missed their friends, especially my fourteen-year-old grandfather, James.

  He wanted out as fast as he could because of his thirteen-year-old girlfriend, Sally Connors. While Sally’s father hoped she would forget about the poverty-stricken former coal miner’s son, she was in love and their monthly letters kept the flame going.

  After three years, Sally’s daddy relented. On the condition he marry Sally and stay put in America, he sponsored James to attend university and medical school. For Grandpa, that was a dream come true. He would died with a huge grin on his face if he never returned to the land of the slant eyes.

  After medical school, James and Sally settled in Seattle. Dr. James Reid was gregarious and it took no time for his practice to grow. The family bought a home in the fancy Capitol Hill area, James was unanimously elected as a church deacon and Sally was the doting mother of three strapping boys. The only connection they had with China was James’ generous support of his parents.

  And then, American entry into WWII. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and on the next day, attacked US and British warships in Shanghai’s harbor.

  Grandpa James enlisted for service. When Sally and her family protested, grandpa replied, “God, family and country. If any of them need help, I will be there and this war impacts all three. I will not stand here idly.”

  Dr. James Reid was one of over fifty thousand physicians that were part of the worldwide U.S. Army Medical Corps. Because he could speak Chinese, he was assigned to the China Burma India Theater.

  It was a hellish job. Overwhelming disease and malnutrition affected millions on the CBI Theater. That and the deplorable sanitation conditions made conditions in the mobile health units a constant and draining challenge to all who served. Plague, cholera, amebic dysentery, and typhoid were endemic as were sexually transmitted diseases. Most American Army physicians had little knowledge of tropical diseases and with lack of hygiene and waste disposal, it seemed as if everyone had diarrhea.

  With the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 and Japanese surrender, it was the first time since December 1941 that James had a chance to think. A necessary evil, but evil nonetheless, he penned in his journal. Praise be to God!

  James went to visit his father, Calvin in Henghua. He hadn’t seen him for over ten years. When he had left, he was a rebellious teenager and now, he returned as a man of honor who had seen the worst of life and survived.

  Amidst the rubble of the devastated village, his father showed him his pride and joy—the burnt out shell of a small church that the townspeople had built. James now saw China with new eyes. Not as a foul-smelling place full of backwards peasants, but as a place where despairing people needed hope.

  When he got back to Seattle, James gingerly asked Sally if she would move to China.

  “Of course,” was grandmother’s immediate reply.

  Seeing James shocked reaction, she added, “I am not my father’s daughter, Sally Connors. I am Sally Reid, wife of Dr. James Reid, the best man in the world.”

  That was a brave thing for her to say because her parents threatened to disinherit her. Grandpa and Grandma still packed up young Samuel, George and Heather to become the next generation of Reids to be missionaries in China.

  This was an uncertain and difficult time as China strove to find its place post WWII. The Communists had taken over China and religion of all kinds, especially those from the West, were persecuted. The only thing that Mao Tse Dung wanted anyone to worship was himself.

  However, Grandma Sally did have one condition. Shewas never big on small towns. Seeing that Shanghai was the closest big city to Henghua, the family settled there where Grandpa worked out of the Huadong Hospital. On evenings and weekends, he volunteered at local clinics where he did not charge for his services. I’m just guessing, but I think it was this free work he did that kept the family from being victims of one of Mao’s purges.

  My dad, George, unlike his own father, James, never wanted to be anywhere but China. Working alongside his father in the volunteer clinics, he realized he couldn’t stand sickness so much to Grandpa James chagrin, medicine was not an option for George. George loved working with kids though and it was suggested he become a teacher. After his initial outrage, Mr. Connors softened. After my father made a pitch to him, he paid for his teacher’s training. The four years he went to a Christian university in California were the only four years he spent away from China.

  In teacher’s college, he met my mom, Sarah, the daughter of a Baptist preacher. My father’s missionary zeal was infectious. The two married and returned to China in the early eighties where they taught in a private school in Shanghai. Here, they had to be extremely careful of prosletyzing.

  Sharing religious beliefs in China was definitely taboo. Religious persecution was rampant. Beatings and incarceration were common. What was particularly difficult was that no tolerance of religion policy was not uniformly applied. Many areas or towns did not persecute, and those that did had no established guidelines for punishment. Owning a Bible might get you a beating, five years in jail, a stint in a labor camp… or sometimes nothing happened at all.

  There were problems on the personal front as well--Sarah had a hard time conceiving. Invitro fertilization was exhorbitantly and extremely uncommon in Shanghai so they accepted that children were not part of the Lord’s plan for them. But who knows the mind of God? When I was born in 1987, I was celebrated as a “miracle baby” from Shanghai to Seattle.

  I was their “little precious” and George and Sarah would do anything to protect me, so when the Tianamen Square Massacre happened in 1989, my parents decided they had to move. Even though Tianamen incidents happened in Beijing, almost a thousand miles away, the uncertainty of possible persecution or incarceration over their beliefs weighed even heavier, now that I was born.

  To stay as close to China as possible, we moved to Hong Kong when I was two. It was under the “One Country, Two Systems” principle agreed upon between the United Kingdom and the People’s Republic of China. This ensured that capitalism, democracy and freedom of religion would continue until 1997.

  It was liberating for my parents to be there. But of course, they had to adapt to their new conditions.

  Public education in Hong Kong was excellent but it wasn’t for everybody. Tough curriculum, high standards, iron-fisted teachers and strict discipline. Woe to anyone that was late for class, skipped school or heaven forbid, failed a test.

  The square pegs that didn’t fit into these round holes were the kinds of students my parents had. They established the “Good Shepherd School” in the elevatorless fifth floor tenement two bedroom apartment we lived in. Even though there were sometimes as many as thirty-two students enrolled, our place was fine. Most of the time, less than a dozen students showed up for class and Mom and Dad were accommodating with makeup classes or tutoring at unscheduled times.

  There were two things that really drew students to the Good Shepherd. Firstly, my parents were white, native English speakers who were also completely fluent in Chinese. Secondly, tuition was “free” which meant maybe a bag of oranges or a cooked chicken or occasionally a thousand dollars.

  I was only four, and because Mom and Dad were so busy and the apartment was so crowded, I often wandered around outside. Because my parents were respected and loved, I was kind of a “neighborhood pet” that people watched out for.

  While some called the area we lived in a slum or skid row or a ghetto, I loved it. It was diverse and vibrant and always teeming with life. There were children playing outside sleazy bars, bald monks chanting in a tiny Buddhist temple, shops with ten-foot wide storefronts jammed with anything you might like to buy, and all kinds of places that catered to the Chinese’ mania for freshness.

  Street hawkers, carts and shops se
lling fish so fresh that its body flinched if you touched it, innards from newly killed pigs, produce that two hours ago was still growing in the farm, and squawking chickens. Office workers and hookers lined up side by side at outdoor stalls for steamed dumplings and pastries. Yum yum yum.

  No one could afford to go movies but then again, you didn’t need to. Apartments were so small that people were always out on the street, singing Chinese opera, doing the slow motion Tai Chi, karaoe and what fascinated me most of all—three martial artists showing their moves and tricks.

  The three musketeers broke boards with their hands and heads; they jumped higher than houses; and they were ferocious like wild animals when they fought. But there were two really, super special exhibits I got to tell you about.

  The three would form a triangle about sixty feet apart. Then they’d run like leopards towards the center then leap high to the sky. They’d whirl or somersault, and then the three would high five each other mid-air, before descending to the ground.

  The other show was when two of them would crouch side by side. The third would race towards them. He would leap and do an aerial somersault. Simultaneous to that, the two crouching would spring up, raise their arms and then each one of them would grab an outstretched hand of the person finishing the somersault and descend. The two that had been crouching would land upright on their feet with their arms outstretched. The third person was upside down, his hands supported by the others.

  Absolutely amazing. I shrieked and applauded every time I saw them.

  Sometimes, there was an old man watching and barking at them. I was shocked that instead of complaining, they listened attentively. They woud then turn to him and bow. Then I understood—this man was their teacher, their sifu. Master Wu.

  Because they lived closeby, I sometimes followed them and watched them practice inside their studio, a converted storefront that opened onto the street. I knew that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life but thought I better wait until I was older. Maybe I could start when I was six… or five.