by Marc Cameron
Akana planned to steam northward, meandering through the islands of Indonesia as part of a joint antipiracy operation with that country, Malaysia, and Singapore. His father had been a policeman in Honolulu and antipiracy duty made him feel like he was channeling his law enforcement bloodlines.
The message came in directly from Admiral Jenkins, Akana’s boss with the Seventh Fleet in San Diego. The communications specialist handed him the headset so he’d be able to hear over the hustle-and-bustle noise of the bridge.
The orders were clear, and according to the admiral came directly from the President. Not that that would have mattered. Akana was a Navy man. As far as he was concerned, an order was an order, whether from a captain or the commander in chief.
Akana ended the call and handed the headset back to the radio operator before motioning his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Nicole Carter, to the chart table.
“Bird’s Head Peninsula on the northwestern shores of New Guinea. Take her up as close to flank speed as you can without breaking something.”
“Our mission, Skipper?” the XO asked.
“Rescuing a couple of operatives,” he said, leaning forward so only the XO could hear. “And possibly a tiny invasion of Indonesia.”
51
We have the sat phone,” Adara said, pushing a broad, waxy banana leaf out of her path. “I don’t know if our trackers are still operational. We’ll need something to signal our exact location for pickup.” They’d been running for well over two hours, the many canyons and cliffs impeding their progress up the mountain. The sun was high in the sky now, making them feel as though they were boiling alive in the humid jungle air. Sweat plastered hair to their foreheads and stung their eyes. They’d slowed almost to a stop, partly to be more careful about how many tracks they were leaving, but mainly because the terrain had grown so steep.
“I have a lighter,” Chavez said, panting, as much from pain as exertion. “We’ll have to look for something dry enough to burn. The problem is, we signal the ship, we also signal the shitheads coming up behind us.”
“True,” Adara said. She bent the thick stalk of the plant beside her to pull a sagging hand of small orange-yellow mountain bananas close enough to reach. Each fruit was not much larger than a finger. “You think these are edible?”
“Sure,” Chavez said. “Not sweet, but they’ll give us some energy.” He gingerly touched his wrist. “You got any more of those Ranger M&M’s?”
“No ibuprofen for you,” Adara said. “I’ll give you another Tylenol, but that’s all. Let me wrap it while we’re here.” She peeled a small banana and gave it to Chavez before retrieving a rolled ACE bandage from her pack. “Apart from the bruised noggin and wrist, you okay otherwise?” she asked. “One broken bone means we’re supposed to look for more.”
“I think I’m good.” Chavez grinned, trying to add some levity. “Funny, Clark doesn’t want to die of old age . . . but I’d be fine with it right now.”
Adara expertly wrapped the wrist, giving it some support, if not an actual splint. “What was that I heard about JP playing some kind of sport?”
Chavez chuckled, wincing from the effort. “E-sports,” he said.
“E-sports?”
“Computer games,” Chavez said, panting. “Disguised as sports. The downward slide John sees in the youth of the world might be why he doesn’t relish the idea of a ripe old age. Anyway, I’m not sure what JP is going to do now that he’s graduated. He’s been accepted to Stanford, but he’s not as keen on it as he should be.”
“A gap year?”
“I sure as hell hope not,” Chavez said. “Patsy would freak out. She’s already got med school mapped out for him.”
A nearby branch snapped in the jungle below, causing them both to freeze.
52
It was common knowledge that any Air Force aircraft that carried the President of the United States was known as Air Force One. The convention held true through the other branches of the military as well—Marine One, Army One, Navy One, et cetera. Vice-presidential aircraft received the designation Air Force Two, and so on. In the unlikely event that POTUS flew on a commercial aircraft—it hadn’t happened since Nixon—that aircraft used the call sign Executive One. At the discretion of the White House and the U.S. Secret Service, any aircraft, military or civilian, that carried the First Lady could be designated Executive One-Foxtrot. The F designation was for family.
Tonight, wanting to stay off the radar of the hundreds of scanner folk who meticulously tracked the planes, trains, and automobiles that carried the First Family, they would use the tail number of their military aircraft.
As First Lady of the United States, Dr. Cathy Ryan could travel in any of several military aircraft flown by the Special Air Mission of the 89th Airlift Wing—her staff coordinating with the offices of VPOTUS, secretaries of state and defense, and, once in a while, congressional delegations, who utilized the same aircraft. The President customarily traveled via presidential lift on Marine One between the White House and Joint Base Andrews, just south of the Beltway. When she traveled without her husband, the First Lady usually made the trip in an armored Lincoln Town Car that was safely ensconced in a motorcade of D.C. Metropolitan Police and Secret Service vehicles.
Always hungry for anything to feed their twenty-four-hour news cycle appetite, dozens of media outlets kept their cameras aimed at the White House every moment of the day. The First Family, senior staff, and visiting dignitaries all received scrutiny, down to their clothes and type of shoes. Groundskeepers, other media folks, and especially Secret Service personnel blended in with the scenery like the proverbial postman whom no one ever saw.
Tonight, Dr. Ryan left the White House via the West Wing rather than the Residence. She wore a curly brunette wig over her blond hair, and one of Special Agent Maureen Richardson’s dark pin-striped suits. She got in the front passenger seat of the Town Car, opening the door herself—something the Secret Service never allowed her to do. The agent behind the wheel pulled away as if he was on a routine fueling mission, stopping to wave at the Uniformed Division officer at the vehicle gate. They didn’t join the follow-up Suburban and the lead sedan with Mo Richardson until they merged with the river of taillights on 15th Street.
The agent behind the wheel was of Asian ancestry. His name was Robert Leong, one of the Mandarin speakers borrowed from the VP detail for this trip. His father was a teaching physician at Johns Hopkins, where she’d done her residency, so that gave them something to talk about. He looked to Cathy like he was about fourteen, but everyone looked young to her these days.
Most of the aircraft flown by the Special Air Mission had the ubiquitous blue-and-white paint job resembling that of the VC-25A that served as Air Force One. Mo had arranged with the White House liaison officer for the 89th to have the First Lady fly in a plain white C-32, the military version of a Boeing 757-200. There were forty-five seats on board, all of them first class, allowing Mo to take a large complement of agents and gear.
An hour and a half after they left the White House, the First Lady’s plane touched down in Detroit. Airport Police escorted two Secret Service sedans onto the tarmac for a ramp pickup. They knew this was a visit from some kind of dignitary, they just had no idea who. Still wearing the wig, Dr. Ryan exited the plane with the first wave of her detail. A balding agent who bore an uncanny resemblance to a junior congressman from Florida came out in the middle of the pack and got in the backseat of the second vehicle after another agent opened his door.
The vehicles sped away to a hangar near the North Terminal, where Ryan changed into a pair of khaki slacks, a button-down oxford blouse, and a University of Michigan baseball cap before getting in the backseat of an armored Jeep Cherokee. Mo Richardson took her traditional spot in the front passenger seat, beside the Secret Service driver.
It was spitting rain, and on the chilly side, making Mo’s
jaws feel tight, like she’d been smiling a lot—not uncommon for her.
“That was fun,” the First Lady said, settling into her seat.
“It was smooth,” Mo admitted.
She didn’t point out that any problems they were likely to encounter would be at the hospital, not while they were en route. It rarely did any good to make the principal more nervous than she already was.
“Will the others just meet us there?” Dr. Ryan asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mo said. “I’d rather not point out where they’re all posted. Try not to look around when we get out of the car, but we’ll have agents all over the place, both in and outside the building. You’ll recognize some of the faces of people we have in the clinic.”
“Sounds good.” Ryan leaned forward, touching Richardson on the shoulder. She did that sometimes. “Mo, I’m glad it’s you doing this. It lets me focus on what I need to do.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Richardson said, striking the balance between gushy fan-girl and humble professional, she hoped.
If more of the self-centered bozos getting protection from the Secret Service ever realized how far a simple thank-you would go . . . Early in her career, Mo Richardson had started a list of all the assholes she’d protected—but lists like that became too unwieldy in Washington, D.C. It was much easier to keep track of the good ones.
Mo looked at the moving map on her phone that rested on her knee, and called out a ten-minute warning when they passed through Ypsilanti and took the exit for Geddes Road.
Twelve minutes later, the driver pulled up curbside in front of Kellogg Eye Center. Again, Dr. Ryan opened her own door. She pulled the hood of a rain jacket over her ball cap against the drizzle and hustled across a dark and deserted sidewalk next to Mo Richardson.
A pair of agents Dr. Ryan recognized from her regular detail met them at the glass doors. Both were dressed in hospital scrubs. A redheaded man with a mop—Special Agent Rory Sharp, out of the PPD Critical Assignment Team—worked on the lobby floors, earbuds in his ears, apparently ignoring the procession.
The advance agents led Mo and Dr. Ryan via elevator to the fourth floor, where they almost ran headlong into a tall, cadaverous-looking man in the long white coat of a medical school professor. He was clean shaven but had mussed silver hair that came well past his ears, making him look like he could have been teaching at Hogwarts.
Dr. Ryan was in the middle of a yawn as the elevator doors opened, but brightened at once when she saw him.
“Daniel!” she said, gathering the man in an all-enveloping bear hug.
For a moment, Mo thought the man might lift the First Lady off her feet. Instead, he held her out at arm’s length, grinning wildly. “It’s been too long, my dear,” he said in an accent that was either British, or affected upper-crust American English—like he was clenching a cigarette holder between his teeth. “How is my old study partner?”
“Things are busy,” Ryan said. Underplaying her hand.
“I’ll bet,” Dr. Dan Berryhill said. “I miss our study sessions . . . Remember those little mnemonic ditties we used to sing?”
He raised his bushy brows up and down in an inside joke.
Dr. Ryan gave a nervous laugh, trying to demur, but he dragged her into a rollicking duet to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
“Zenker’s diverticulum and glottic stenosis, if you don’t seek treatment soon, you will get halitosis . . .”
The agents in scrubs looked on, mildly amused.
Mo Richardson stifled a giggle.
A blond nurse, who wore a white ceramic lapel pin over her nametag, leaned closer to Mo and whispered, “My experience, the brightest ones are always just a little odd . . .” The nurse stood up straighter and addressed the group. “You guys want to follow me to the back? There are some folks here you probably want to talk to.”
53
Hope was never a plan, but sometimes, after you did all you could, that was all that was left. Adam Yao had done everything he could to bolster his chances for success.
The execution of Yao’s plan began as soon as the Songs, a very tired little girl, the general’s twitchy aide, and Tsai Zhan, the minder, approached the Immigration checkpoint at JFK on their arrival to New York after the fourteen-hour flight from Beijing. Every country in the developed world had some level of medical screening for inbound visitors. Some methods were overt, like the large, cameralike thermometer aimed at the arrival corridor in Narita, Japan. Some, like the sensors and sniffers at U.S. Immigration in JFK, were less noticeable.
President Ryan had ordered the State Department to smooth the Songs’ entry into the U.S. with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They didn’t have to stand in lines, but they were required to report to an Immigration official.
The inspector, a middle-aged woman of Chinese heritage whom Yao had chosen because her human-capital sheet listed acting experience, noted to Tsai Zhan when he came through that he had a low-grade fever. She asked him a series of mandatory health questions, had him present himself to a bleary-eyed staff doctor in a small room off to the side, who asked him more questions. There had been talk at Langley of stopping him here, but Yao’s supervisors concluded that it would look like too much of an obvious political attempt to scrape him from the entourage, and would only cast more suspicion on the general.
“Welcome to the United States,” the inspector said with a welcoming smile, once the doctor gave the nod. “Probably just a bug. Get some rest and drink lots of fluids. Maybe some chicken soup.”
Tsai said that he felt fine, but the inspector reported to Yao that he’d touched his forehead with the back of his hand as he walked away—just in case.
Because of the late hour, they’d arranged for a charter flight from New York to Wayne County Airport in Detroit.
A clerk at the charter company (a CIA officer whom Yao had embedded there) met the group with a look of genuine concern. He asked if Tsai was feeling a little under the weather, mentioning offhand that there was something going around. He offered him a squirt of hand sanitizer—that Yao had laced with a scopolamine concoction developed by the docs at CIA. Tsai accepted, with a sneer of disgust. He didn’t take much, but he got enough to add to the queasiness he was already feeling from the earlier suggestions that he looked sick. The power of suggestion was a wonderful social engineering tool.
Not an official government trip, the Songs and their two hangers-on had squished into a large sedan, rented at the general’s personal expense and driven west on a dark and almost deserted I-94 through a steady rain. By the time they reached Ann Arbor, the general’s white shirt and his wife’s fashionable gray suit looked as though they’d been dug out of a hamper.
Kellogg had no covered parking, but staff ushered them quickly out of the rain and up to the fourth floor. Mrs. Song helped settle little Niu into an exam room to be prepped for surgery. The room was cramped, so General Song wished his granddaughter well at the doorway and remained in the lobby, slouching on the sofa, stoically looking a thousand yards away.
A callow military aide in his late twenties fidgeted in the seat to the general’s left. Obviously accustomed to a uniform, he wore an ill-fitting suit, probably purchased just for the occasion. The only reason for him to be here was to provide an extra set of eyes and ears for General Bai. Yao could see it in the poor kid’s eyes. The misgivings of being ordered to spy on the man he worked for and the fear of discovery, or worse, discovering something he did not want to know.
Tsai Zhan sat across from the general, between him and the door, a gray cotton golf jacket draped across his lap. His knee bounced slightly. His eyes flicked back and forth, checking every exit, as if he feared Song might try to make a run for it. He held a gardening magazine but didn’t read it. Jet lag alone was enough to make most people feel somewhat queasy, like they were coming down with a touch of something. Tsai neede
d only a little nudge.
All Yao had to do was walk by with a cart of coffee for the nurses’ station for Tsai to demand some tea. The political minder was accustomed to getting his way.
The nurse standing at an open laptop on the reception counter shot Yao a side-eye and nodded toward Tsai, as if to say, You’d better take care of this.
“Of course, sir,” Yao said. He gave a slight bow, awkward, like Tsai would expect an uncouth American to be—absent even the most basic etiquette. Yao looked at Song and his aide in turn. “I have tea or coffee.”
“I do not care for anything,” the general said.
The aide, terrified at being spoken to in English, gave a twitchy shake of his head.
“I would prefer tea,” Tsai snapped. He might as well have been pounding his fist on the table.
Yao pumped a cup full of hot water from the urn, and then passed it to Tsai with two sachets of tea that looked as though they had never been opened.
Now it was only a matter of time—and how much of this tea Tsai decided to drink.
* * *
—
The operating room was smaller than Mo had been led to believe, or, rather, crowded with more instruments that took up much of the available floor space than she’d realized. Both Dr. Ryan and Dr. Berryhill had taken off their shoes. Ryan explained that eye surgery was often compared to flying a helicopter, as the surgeon had to utilize each hand and each foot independently—focusing the microscope, manipulating the eye itself, suturing, operating the laser, the cameras—or any of the equipment necessary for such a delicate surgery. By the time both surgeons, an anesthesiologist, and two nurses crowded around the table, there was little space left in the room for Mo. The general and his wife were not offered spots in the viewing theater, leaving that room for the two armed agents who were in contact with the detail posted outside and at the nurses’ station.