by David Poyer
“You can’t go after him?”
“Coming alongside a small boat, in the dark, one that doesn’t want to be caught, isn’t easy. Not trying to maneuver ten thousand tons of cruiser. He’ll just skip out of the way. Plus, he’s armed. If I drop my visit and search team on him, he might not be the only one who gets hurt.”
Aisha looked away, feeling both guilty—it was her pistol out there—and angry. But then, they’d always known Noblos was smarter than the average criminal. “I should have anticipated this. Why should somebody with his ego wait around for trial, imprisonment, even a death sentence?”
“You really think he was facing death?”
“Rape, attempted murder, they’re capital crimes. And once we established jurisdiction, this would be a federal charge. Even a twenty-year sentence, for someone his age, would mean life in prison.”
Dan said, “Whereas if he defects, he’s a noted scientist. With a hell of a lot of valuable knowledge about our most advanced systems.”
“There you have it,” Aisha said. They stared at each other.
Dan turned back to the console operator. “Range to the RHIB.”
“Stand by … twelve thousand five hundred yards. Speed, ten knots. Course, two eight zero.”
Setting course for the Senkakus, all right.
Only a hundred miles away.
“Take with guns,” Dan said.
The petty officer hesitated. “Say again, Captain?”
“Designate to guns. Take with the after five-inch. Radar control. Is that sea return going to foul you up?”
“We’ve got a decent lock-on,” the petty officer said. “And with proximity-fuzed high explosive … I wouldn’t wait until the range opens much more, though. You’re going to lose him in this clutter. And fifteen thousand yards is pretty much max range.”
Dan grabbed the agent by the shoulder, felt her flinch away under his hand; but held on, and led her to the command desk. A weary Cheryl Staurulakis glanced down from the displays. “XO, Dr. Noblos is defecting in the boat. He stole the agent’s pistol. There’s one crewman with him. May be an accomplice. May be just a hostage. Backstop me?”
“We can’t let him go,” Staurulakis said. “He knows the whole fucking system! Aegis. ALIS. Block 4. ABM cuing. And how to disrupt them, too, I’ll bet.”
“Maneuver to recapture?”
The exec frowned. “He’s armed? In the dark? He’ll take people with him. May be blue-on-blue casualties, too.”
“We’re on the same page, then.” He looked to Ar-Rahim. “Agent?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t believe this. “You want my blessing? On a summary execution? I can’t give you that.”
“So we let him go over to the enemy? With everything he knows?”
She closed her eyes; said a short du’a asking for wisdom. “I’m not a judge. Or a jury. And neither are you, Captain. With all due respect.” She looked at the overhead. Black as the night outside. “I am bound to advise you … if you do what you seem to have in mind, I’ll have to prefer charges. Once we make port.”
“What charges?” the exec said. “Bearing in mind that this is wartime.”
“Murder, of course. Two counts. Wartime has nothing to do with it.”
“To prevent defection? Protect sensitive information?”
“Those would be extenuating arguments at the trial,” she admitted.
The exec said, “A warning shot, then.”
Dan nodded, suddenly relieved. Of course. “Good call, XO. Matt, take control. One round, ahead of the RHIB. And call on the boat channel. See if they have the radio on. Come back alongside, right now, or we take him down.”
“He’s not coming back,” Aisha said. “Not him. But I agree. Giving him the chance, that’s a sadaqah. A good deed.”
Dan blinked, taken aback by the interjection. But maybe she was right. “One round, high explosive, variable time, batteries released,” he said.
The jolt carried faintly back through the metal around them. Dan strolled through the ranks of bent backs, glowing screens, to the gun-control console. He got there in time for the petty officer to point to a bright patch that appeared in the clutter, ahead of the fleeing boat. It grew, then faded. “Splash.”
“Range?”
“To the boat, fourteen thousand two hundred yards. Splash, about two hundred yards ahead of it.”
“Good shooting. Think they saw it?”
“Saw it, heard it … yessir. But … starting to lose it. Too much sea return. And it looks like they’ve jettisoned their radar reflector.”
An encapsulated metal shape that let Savo track her boats more clearly at a distance. Yeah, Noblos would think of that. “Is he changing course? Coming back?”
“Wait one … no. Steady course. Speed may be picking up.”
Dan turned his head to the agent, beside him. She was making notes. He sucked cold air. Sweat trickled under his clothes. “I can’t let him go. Not with all he knows. I can’t hand the enemy that advantage. His crime’s really beside the point.”
“I can’t judge you,” Aisha said. She looked at her watch, noted the time. “But I’ll present the facts.”
“We have to leave station. Even getting back to Guam is going to be questionable.”
“You are the captain,” she said. “No one can really know what is right, in the end. Only Allah knows the whole. But He gives it to you to decide. You must do the best you can, and trust in God.”
Well, there it was. Nothing left he could say to that.
“Batteries released. Five rounds. Fire for effect,” he told the petty officer. Trying not to feel whatever his gut was urging: vengeance; righteousness; anger; even regret.
In the end, none of those could claim a place in his decisions. Only the rules of engagement and operational necessity. Those alone had to guide his actions, as coldly and rationally as if he himself were an autonomous computer, working through millions of lines of passionless code. That was the basis on which he would be judged. On earth, as in heaven? And what about Benyamin? Was he guilty at all, or just collateral damage?
He couldn’t know that now. Might never know. But the agent was right, wherever she was coming from.
He was the captain.
The responsibility was his.
The bangs sounded tinny and remote. He had time for a couple of breaths between each round; the Mark 45 fired slowly for a fully automatic gun. They sounded too distant and trivial to be seventy-pound chunks of steel and high explosive going out at three thousand feet per second. Reaching out in ballistic arcs over the dark sea, as second after second ticked out. Sensing their target, and calculating the distance. Until a circuit closed.
One after the other, green returns blossomed around the contact. Soundless. Almost lost, in the speckle of heaving sea.
When at last they faded, the pip was no longer there.
30
Western China
THE train didn’t stop again for two days. More Vietnamese died, and were stacked at the far end of the car. Teddy could hardly smell them over the stink of the rest of the locked-in POWs. All that time the train climbed. It got colder, until breath crackled and urine froze on the steel floor. He slept spoon-fashion with Pritchard, who talked less and less as time went on.
But the day finally came when the train jolted to a halt again, and they were rifle-butted out into a blinding daylight.
To Camp 576.
His first impression was of a teeming of gray lice festering a desolate landscape of gravel and sand. Vertical walls of pinkish crumbling rock surrounded an immense bowl amid gray hills. The eroding walls looked natural, but were still fearsome barriers. A dull explosion reverberated as the guards herded the prisoners down a barbed-wire lane from the rail spur down into the depression. A trooper with a Kalashnikov watched each fifty yards.
On a second look down, Teddy changed his mind. This gigantic hole in the earth had been scooped out by human effort. The thin wind was chilly, the
sky russet with the same shade of fine dust he’d seen in eastern Afghanistan. Beyond the pinkish outcrops rocky hills undulated toward the horizon. Past them, in the far distance, rose jagged, uneven intaglios of mountain, deep-cut ravine-shadows intercutting black with indigo and rose-petal.
As the prisoners were mustered into lines and counted, he wondered dully where exactly they were. Somewhere in far northwestern China was as close as he could come.
“Gankai! Gankai!” He knew what that meant now. “Hurry up!” But he couldn’t hurry. He had to drag the ruined foot behind him, with it bent to the side opposite where the tendons had been torn from the bone. Walking on the butt end of his tibia, each step was a stabbing agony. He didn’t want to be beaten again. They got enthusiastic with those rifle butts. But he was going to be tail-end Charlie in any line.
Not a good place to end up. Not if he wanted to survive.
Did he?
“Give us an arm, mate,” Magpie Pritchard said, beside him. Another explosion thumped the air. It didn’t sound far off, but it was strangely subdued. Neither artillery nor mortar. The Australian pulled Teddy’s arm over his shoulders, but it didn’t work. He towered above the Vietnamese, above the Chinese guards. “You stand out like a fucking lighthouse, Maggie,” Teddy told him.
“Chenmo, chenmo!” the guards shouted. He knew that, too—it meant “shut up.” Whoa, getting fluent, Obie. Another in your long list of fucked-up accomplishments.
The day progressed. They were herded into a corral and made to squat in the blowing grit, hands behind their heads. The guards strolled among them, slugging anybody who relaxed the posture. One by one, the POWs passed down a disassembly line of what he assumed were convict trusties. Many had flatter faces and darker complexions than the guards. Tibetans? They shaved his head, then made him throw all his clothes onto a fire. He was hosed down with icy water, then issued a thin gray cotton uniform. The pants hems came only to his shins. A Chinese character was stenciled on the back. No sign of underwear or socks, which wasn’t going to be good if it got colder. Teddy kept pointing to his foot, but no one seemed to care. He was issued faded, torn blue canvas shoes with white rubber soles, like a geezer would wear in Palm Beach. And a pair of brand-new, beautifully sewn goatskin gloves with decorative red beads sewn on the back. They looked like high-end gardening gloves. He stood in line for a ladle of the same thin white corn mush they’d gotten on the train.
The guards pushed him down to a squat on the ground in front of a desk. The official, on a wooden chair, tried Teddy in Chinese, then in what must have been Vietnamese, because the other POWs in line giggled. The official reddened. He called over another man, maybe his supervisor. This latter fished a booklet from a pocket and leafed through it. Frowned down at Teddy, and said, enunciating very carefully, “You … American?”
“Yes. American. Prisoner of war.”
“American criminal of war.”
Teddy spoke slowly and loudly. “Prisoner of war. I need medical treatment. Geneva Convention.”
The guy consulted his booklet. Looked pissed off. Finally he said, “Here at Camp Five Seven Six, work. What can do?”
“Not much. Not with this.” Teddy lifted his leg; the official glanced at the dangling appendage. “POWs are entitled to medical attention.”
“You bing hao?”
“Excuse me?”
“You sick one. Half food.” He spoke to the guy at the desk, who nodded and made a note.
“Oh, fuck me,” Teddy mumbled.
“You say what?” The official spat orders at two guards, who came to attention. “Fuck me? You say, fuck me? Guanjao ta!”
The beating this time was prolonged, severe, and by men who didn’t care about leaving marks. When it was over they dragged him to a gravel pile and left him there spread-eagled, like a poster child for Bad Prisoners.
He got some sleep. Not exactly restful, but it was nice to stretch out without someone else’s dick pressed to your asshole.
Only when dark approached did a hand touch him. Help him up.
He pried open swollen eyelids to see Maggie, plus three of the Vietnamese he’d been chained up with on the train. “Come on, mate. They assigned us a doss. Let’s get you under some shelter.”
Their “doss” was a corrugated iron lean-to built against one of the inner walls of the depression. Blackened rocks circled a fire pit. Behind the roof, which formed a six-by-four partially sheltered anteroom, a cave went back about fifteen feet into the rock. The ceiling was just high enough that he could sit upright but couldn’t stand. Dried turds littered the ground between it and the next cave. The hut-caves stretched out of sight around the jut of the bluff. A guard tower loomed at the top. Dried grass and a couple of weary quilted-cotton blankets constituted their bedding. Once again, he slept nestled with Pritchard and the Vietnamese, and was glad of the warmth.
* * *
THE next dawn they were shouted out by a ragged little squint-eyed Chinese carrying a stick. A stakebed truck idled at the bottom of the bluff. Most of the Vietnamese climbed up onto the bed. Teddy was pushed up into a much-abused Toyota pickup. Where the inevitable shackles waited. Pritchard tried to go with him, but the Chinese whacked and shouted him into the big truck, with the Viets.
The pickup drove slowly, rocking and creaking on clapped-out shocks. Glancing sideways as they trundled along a bumpy gravel track, he gradually grasped the layout. The camp proper was built around an open pit mine. The whole operation was much larger than he’d guessed the night before. It had to cover many square miles. He couldn’t tell what they were mining, and didn’t have the vocabulary to ask. An explosion thumped, not far away, but again, oddly muffled. He realized he’d been hearing them all night long, though at longer intervals. They were working a graveyard shift, too. At the far end of the vast depression, the glitter of sheet glass. Buildings? Maybe where the guards lived, where the camp was administered. If there was a road to anything like a town, it would lie in that direction. He glanced up at the sun for his bearings, but got a sharp “Yangjing-lay!” More than one rifle butt had taught him what that meant: “Drop your head, eyes down.”
Eventually they left him at a tower sheathed in the same unrusting corrugated iron as roofed their lean-to. A deafening roar and chatter came from within. A breaker, one of dozens that rose here and there across the floor of the immense pit. The rock came up out of the pits, where most of the prisoners were working, in big diesel dump trucks. From them, it went up a power conveyor to the top of the breaker.
A very old, tottering, rail-thin Chinese with a mask over his mouth and nose shepherded Teddy up steel stairs slick with powdery grit to a platform near the top. There, gigantic steel rollers rotated ceaselessly, shaking the whole building. The din was deafening. Huge driven wheels chewed the ore into progressively smaller pieces as it descended. The air seethed with powdered rock, so thick he could see only eleven or twelve feet in any direction. The old man handed him a rag, and gestured to him to tie it around his face. Pointed to the air, and grasped both hands to his neck in the universal symbol for choking. His hands were withered, scarred, and covered with nodule-like, whitish growths. He patted his own chest. “Lew.”
“Teddy.”
“Ted-ti?”
“Close enough. Ted-ti it is.”
Old Lew closed his fingers around the handle of a push broom leaning in a corner and began acting out what to do. The ore emerged from the mill crushed to a gritty, sparkling powder, the particles like coarse, dirty sea salt. Carried along on a wide rubberized belt, it passed under a bank of electromagnets. Switched on, the magnets sucked up grains of a reddish-brown mineral out of the passing ore. At intervals, a mechanism extended a tray, the current in the magnets was switched off, and the reddish matter dropped into the tray. Teddy’s task was to walk from one side of the breaker to the other with the push broom, brushing away what was left sticking to the magnets after the current cut off. Finally, Lew gathered the filings, or shavings, up with the bro
om, and ran them along the catch tray into a hole at the end.
He handed Teddy the broom and looked expectant. “Ni mingbai ma, Ted-ti?”
“Shid-eh,” Teddy said. He took the broom and brushed a few grains off the magnets, then pushed them into the hole.
The old man beamed as if he’d just graduated med school. “Tway. Ting hao! Ting hao!”
“Ting hao,” Teddy said, bowing. “Manwei bowgow.”
The old guy grabbed his gut, bent over, guffawing so hard Teddy was afraid he was going to choke. “Manwei bowgow! Bu, bu. Wo bushi yigi huwei.”
* * *
HE ran the broom all that morning as the rollers rumbled like Niagara and the metal siding around him reverberated with distant booms. Until, at noon by the sun, a whistle blew, echoing from bluff to bluff down the length of the immense pit.
The breaker shut down, first the diesels that ran the conveyors chugging down the scale, then the rollers and the gearing that drove them rumbling to a halt.
A bell clanged. Dozens of workers streamed out from nooks and machinery onto the ladders. Teddy followed, but slowly, supporting his weight on a handrail. At the bottom of the breaker, in the open air, a wooden table held two tureens. One was the white mush, the other a doubtful-smelling vegetable soup. The powder-fog was dissipating, blown away by a thin wind. He shivered. Even at noon, the breeze was cold outside the tower. Four husky Chinese immediately plumped down, pulling up empty wooden cable-spools as seats. They planted their elbows as old Lew dealt metal bowls from a rolling chest that also held wrenches, screwdrivers, saws. There were only five bowls. Teddy tried to sit down too, but they elbowed him back, chortling. At last Lew said something and they grudgingly let him dip a bowl, but Lew stopped him and poured half of it back. “Bu, bu. Bing hao,” he said. “Ni pàng, ni bìng bù xuyào tài duo de shíwù.” He pointed halfway down the bowl. The husky guys guffawed and slapped their thighs, grinning at him.
Fuck this. He wasn’t going to survive on two mouthfuls of corn mush and rotten veggies. His mouth was bleeding again. No way to clean his teeth since Yongxing. He was going to lose them soon. But he let the thugs push him away, folded himself into a corner, and slurped his mush with his fingers. Eat everything they give you, they’d said at SERE. Yeah, but even there he’d lost ten pounds. His legs were starting to look wasted. His hands were numb most of the time. Too many hours in steel cuffs.