Left for Dead

by Sean Parnell

  Chapter 42

  Falls Church, Virginia

  Meg Harden felt the first jab at one o’clock in the morning, and it was premature.

  She figured at first it was indigestion. She was a healthy woman of average height, and had been in excellent shape and fighting weight prior to the arrival of this human bowling ball distending her belly. It wasn’t the first time that something she’d craved and succumbed to, like the pepperoni pizza and can of Coke she’d consumed tonight, reminded her and the baby in the middle of slumber that such indulgence came with a price.

  But something about this pain was different. During her army career, and then further missions and adventures with the Program, Meg had given it physically as good as she got. She’d been knocked out cold, and had done the same to men half again her size. She’d been blown up downrange, grazed by bullets that drew blood, and had lived to tell about it, and even laugh.

  But this one hurt.

  It felt like something tearing inside. A sharp contraction, yes, but it was too early for that. It felt like the baby needed his toenails cut and was starting to kick at her way low down, except that’s where his head was supposed to be. No, that wasn’t right. That would only come later when she was in labor, right? She couldn’t remember.

  Something in the back of her mind told her to get dressed. She usually slept in a button-down old-fashioned nightshirt, or if it was cold, one of Eric’s big red flannel lumberjack shirts that he’d left behind. Tonight it was cold, so she left Eric’s shirt on and struggled into a pair of panties and a set of gray sweatpants. But she wasn’t going to bother, just yet, with a bra or shoes. No sense in getting paranoid and crazy.

  Another jab doubled her over. She put a hand on the end table next to the bed and stopped to just breathe, and she saw her handgun lying there and decided to lock it up. It was a Ruger SP101 .357 revolver—perfect house gun when you wanted to be sure nothing could jam. She managed to get it into the digital safe in her closet, but it was hard.

  She sat down on the couch in the living room, drank a full glass of water, and tried not to think too much about all the stupid stuff she’d read online—preterm labor, placenta previa, placental abruption, uterine rupture, preeclampsia—all dangerous conditions that could strike without warning and kill the mother, or the baby, or both. She’d asked her doctor, a cranky old Brooklyn-born physician named Goldstein, about all these things, and he’d said, “Meg, stay off the goddamn internet.” But she couldn’t ask him now because he was away on vacation. Or at least that’s what she remembered he’d said. Or was that last month?

  She stared at the wall next to her flat-screen TV and a framed photo of her and Eric that his old keeper, Demo, had taken when they were all out at Smith Mountain Lake on leave. She and Eric were sitting in a small wooden boat, holding fishing rods and laughing. He was kissing her temple and she was grinning at Demo, who’d just made a remark about public displays of affection being strictly verboten in the Program. The original photo had been in color, but she’d had it printed in black and white, as if that could permanently engrave a sweeter past. But Demo was dead, Eric was gone, and it wasn’t sweet anymore.

  She liked things black and white, but she and Eric had never been that. She’d driven him off, told him she was going to keep the baby, but that he’d be nothing more than a passing figure in their child’s life. Now, all at once, she regretted that and wanted to change it. She wanted a father for her son. She wanted him around as part of their lives, every day, for all time, or as long as he lived. She’d been a coward and needed to confess it, one of the hardest things for a tough girl to do.

  Another stab, this one much longer, took her breath away and arched her back. When she was able to breathe again, and had both her small hands on her belly, trying to feel for some movement, she looked down at the couch and saw blood.

  She called an ambulance. She grabbed her purse and threw her wallet and cell phone in it and made it downstairs in the elevator, barefoot, through the lobby and all the way out the front door. But then the two EMTs rushing toward her were just in time to get her onto the gurney before she collapsed.

  Her blood pressure soared as the siren wailed and they rocketed over to the Virginia Hospital Center just a few miles away in Arlington. They put an oxygen mask on her face, and the female EMT gripped her hand and said meaningless things about all the odds being in Meg’s favor. Meg asked for her cell phone and they gave it to her, but she wasn’t sure who to call. Her parents? No. Her father, General “Black Jack” Harden, had made it pointedly clear that he was no fan of her out-of-wedlock choices, and her mother, Meredith, was too meek to defy the old army man. There was only one person on earth she wanted to talk to, so she called Ted Lansky.

  She wasn’t concerned about waking him up. Lansky was one of those government vampires who never slept. He’d been President Rockford’s chief of staff, but she knew from indiscreet occasional phone calls with Ralphy Persko that he was now top dog at the revitalized Program, and that Eric was again operational. She couldn’t call Eric directly, but if anyone could put her in touch with him, Lansky could.

  “I’m sorry, Meg,” he said in that annoying slur that meant he was chewing his cold dead pipe, “but he’s out of pocket.”

  “I know, Mr. Lansky.” She was breathing hard and had pulled the mask off for the moment, which upset her fretting EMTs in the back of the truck. “But it’s an emergency and I need to tell him something important, just for a minute.”

  “I don’t even know where he is at the moment,” Lansky lied.

  “Yes you do, and even if you didn’t I know you could arrange for a comms relay. Please, just do it.”

  “You know the rules, Meg,” he said. “I’m sorry, good luck.” And he hung up.

  The EMTs put her mask back on, looked at each other across her distended belly, and she thought one said something about a valium injection while the other shook his head, but she wasn’t sure because her pulse was pounding in her ears and those stabs were coming faster, like she was wearing some medieval iron chastity belt and someone was turning the screw, and under her hips she felt soaking wet.

  The ambulance arrived at the emergency entrance. The EMTs jumped from the tailgate, pulled her out on the gurney, and rushed her through the big glass sliding doors, just as she looked up at the sky and saw a million winking stars. A nurse appeared and might have been smiling down at her, except everyone was still wearing those stupid Covid masks, as if the frontline hospital workers knew something that everyone else had long since eschewed.

  “Hello, hon,” the nurse said in her kind, immutable, everything’s-gonna-be-okay voice. “Who’s the dad?”

  “Eric Steele,” Meg panted. She was cold, and the tips of her fingers were trembling and blue.

  “Where is he?” the nurse asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  And then she felt a wash of enormous relief. From somewhere, somehow, Dr. Goldstein had appeared. You couldn’t mistake that face or that head, with his spiky gray hair, thick black-framed glasses, and ears like the handles of coffee mugs. But he wasn’t smiling. Even with his mask on she could tell that.

  He leaned over her, put a big hand on her belly, touched the pulse on her neck with his sandpaper rough fingers, then smeared his palm on her glistening forehead.

  “How ya doin,’ kid?” he asked, though he didn’t expect an accurate answer or care about her self-assessment.

  “Not so good, Doc,” she whispered.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  Then he reached down and pulled up the bottom hem of Steele’s big flannel shirt.

  “Jesus Christ,” he hissed, and then he shouted at someone across the emergency room. “Code Blue. Get me a goddamn crash cart.”

  Chapter 43

  Pingtung, Taiwan

  It didn’t take much to make Miko talk.

  The Airborne Special Service Company had its own miniversion of a SERE school, a training phase during which the comm
andos learned the techniques of survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. The resistance module was conducted in a blockhouse building next to the classrooms and the comm shack, where the trainees were subjected to interrogation techniques that broke every rule in the Hague Convention. However, as Panther had said, Pingtung was not Washington, D.C., or the Netherlands.

  Miko had been trussed, thrown in the back of a truck, and delivered straight to the blockhouse from the monastery. Panther knew he didn’t have much time to produce results, because he’d already had to report the incident to HQ at Kaohsiung, and “big army” investigators would soon arrive.

  As his men roped Miko to a metal chair inside, Panther stood outside the door in the early morning sun, seething, smoking, and swollen with guilt and fury. Steele and Goodhill, Hank and Ralphy, were standing there with him when they watched Jackson arrive and hand Panther a long-handled, heavy steel bolt cutter and a blowtorch.

  Steele put a hand on Panther’s big shoulder.

  “Panther, think it over. We all want him dead as much as you do.”

  “I do not want him dead, Steele,” Panther said, though his eyes looked crazy. “I want him to suffer.”

  Goodhill pulled Steele off. It wasn’t their business, and they watched Panther take the tools, kick the heavy iron door open, and storm inside.

  With his shattered knee, smashed nose, and cracked cheekbone, Miko was in substantial pain, yet he was silent and defiant. Then Panther placed the tools on a metal table, slowly unbuttoned his uniform tunic and took it off. In the dim light of a single overhead bulb, Miko saw Panther’s huge naked chest and rippling stomach, the vicious pink welts of bullet holes and blade scars, and a pectoral tattoo in Chinese characters that said “Your Death Is My Honor.” Then Panther picked up the bolt cutter, lit the blowtorch, turned the faucet handle so the flame spit long and blue and orange, and said in Cantonese, “Ching buyao shuo hua.”

  Please, don’t talk.

  Miko told him everything he knew about the Swords of Qing. Everything. He babbled details about Zaifeng, SOQ’s disposition, their helicopters, their weapons. He told Panther things the commando leader didn’t even need to know. It was very productive, but to Panther, a disappointment. . . .

  Soon after that, they escorted Colonel Dr. Ai Liang to her final rest. The National Security Bureau had ordered Panther not to acquire a casket from a civilian funeral home outside the base. Technically speaking, the PLA biowarfare officer had never arrived in Taiwan, and the agents said the CCP should never know of her death. She might still be useful someday, as a ghost.

  And so, her body had been washed, per tradition, by Panther’s sister and niece, who then dressed her again in a black monk’s sheath for her journey, and placed her in a long wooden ammunition crate that had been used for ground-to-air rockets. Panther, Jackson, and four more commandos carried her makeshift coffin on their shoulders, followed by the rest of the squadron and their American comrades. They walked down to the end of the airstrip and out to a small hill on the parachute landing zone, and placed her on a crisscrossed construct of timbers the men had ripped down from an old outdoor latrine and soaked with aircraft fuel.

  The ceremony was brief. They didn’t have much time, but in the Buddhist tenets, grace took precedence over warfare.

  They did not have the traditional bouquets of flowers, but they spread a few lotus blossoms picked from the field. They did not have piles of fruit, but they’d stuffed their pockets with oranges, and those joined the blossoms. They did not have bells to ring, but each man carried an empty rifle magazine and a bullet, and they clanged the bullets on the magazines and it sounded like a chorus of wind chimes.

  Panther faced west, with Steele at his side, and performed the Dana. Steele had rescued this courageous woman and felt no less responsible than Panther for her death, and he stared at the distant sea and clenched his fists as Panther proffered a prayer. He prayed that of the Six Realms, Ai Lang should be reborn into the Manusya-gati, the human realm where one escapes Samsara and becomes enlightened. Then he recited the Vajracchedika.

  “The Buddha said, life is a journey. Death is a return to earth. The universe is like an inn. The passing years are like dust.

  “Regard this phantom world as a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp—a phantom—and a dream.”

  The men bowed their heads. Panther lit a match and the pyre burst into orange flames. They all turned away from Ai Liang’s immolation, and returned to the TOC to prepare for war.

  Panther’s tactical operations center was nothing like the elaborate Program setup back at Q Street. It was more like the special forces TOCs that Steele had encountered at FOBs in Afghanistan.

  It was a cinder block bunker, with one large flat screen on the western wall, a ten-foot-wide briefing space, and two rows of scuffed wooden desks piled with tactical radios, all of them linked to the comm shack and its antenna forest by twists and tangles of wires slung from the drop-down ceiling. Six young male and female communications specialists wearing starched uniforms and headsets were perched at the desks, fielding updates from all branches of the ROC armed forces. They chattered in Chinese and tore incoming printouts from old-style teletype machines, while the echoes of gunfire boomed from the ranges outside.

  Ralphy had been given an empty desk, had opened his Alienware, and was firing encrypted messages back and forth with Frankie in Washington. Goodhill had another desk, where he’d opened a comm link directly to Ted Lansky. But he couldn’t sit still and was pacing back and forth with a handset at the end of a coiled wire, chewing an unlit cigar, awaiting instructions and cursing under his breath.

  Panther’s interrogation session with Miko had been recorded and quickly transcribed by an ASSC intel analyst. Jackson had a copy in hand, and therefore the flat-screen monitor already displayed an overhead view of Uotsuri Island. A squad of Jackson’s men had set up a long wooden folding table in the briefing space, brought buckets of mud inside, and were finishing a six-foot primitive model of the kidney-shaped island so the ASSC could plan their raid.

  Panther, Jackson, three of their element leaders, Steele, and his father surrounded the table and looked at the mud pile model. Panther was holding a long wooden pointer and was just about to start issuing orders when one of his radiomen called him to his station and gave the commander a handset. Panther listened, grunted a series of “yessirs,” flushed deeply red in the face, and gave the module back.

  He walked over to Steele, handed him the pointer, and said, “That was the minister of defense. He is displeased with the careless death of Dr. Liang. I have been dishonored. The mission is yours to command.”

  Steele shook his head. “I’m not going without you, Panther.”

  “He did not say that I could not go. He said that I could not lead.”

  “Fuck the minister of defense,” Steele said. “We’ll do this together.”

  Panther grinned. “You are a thief and a renegade, Steele.”

  “Thank you.” Steele nodded back, then he turned to Jackson and tapped the model’s muddy ridgeline with the pointer. “What have they got, Jackson?”

  “They have at least two heavy machine guns, likely W85s in 12.7 mm, and some type 67s. The men carry QBZ-95 bullpup assault rifles in 5.8 mm. All have pistols, type 86 ball grenades, and some RPG-7s.”

  “Standard stuff,” said Steele. “Tell me about the helos.”

  “Three Chinese Harbin Z-20s. Like your Black Hawks.”

  “Where the hell did they get those?”

  “Purchased from the manufacturer,” Panther said. “Painted them to look like CCP aircraft.”

  “That’s a lot of money from somewhere,” Steele said.

  “Seven,” Ralphy called out to Steele. “I’ve got a feed from the NRO. They picked up another burn in northwest Manchuria.”

  “That was their base,” Panther said. “They destroyed it.”

  “So they’ve got no plans to go h
ome,” Steele said.

  “They’re not going home, kid,” Goodhill said from where he was pacing and waiting for a green light from Lansky. “They’re going to freaking Valhalla.”

  “Jackson, tell us about the Gantu-62,” Steele said.

  Jackson perused the interrogation transcript.

  “The prisoner said they have one vacuum-type canister, but also two kinds of sprayers. They are backpacks, like those tools you Americans use in your yards.”

  “Leafblowers?”

  “Yes, like that.”

  “That’s what they used on the Windhoek,” Hank said.

  Steele scratched his beard for a moment and then said to Panther, “Have you got a flamethrower?”

  “A flamethrower? Maybe. We have one old one from the 1980s in the armory, but we have never used it.”

  “Can you crank it up?”

  Panther snapped something in Chinese to one of his element leaders, who hustled out of the TOC.

  “Hank,” Goodhill called over. He had a strange smirk on his face. “Lansky says when you get back, the boss wants to see you.”

  “Which boss?” Hank asked.

  “POTUS.”

  Hank frowned. “Tell him I’ll check my calendar.”

  “What is this potus?” Panther asked.

  “The president of the United States,” Steele said.

  Panther looked at both Steeles. “You are a very insubordinate family.”

  “You can stop with the compliments, Colonel,” Hank said, and Panther laughed.

  Steele peered at the model of the island, then dropped the pointer to the half-circle of beach on the southern side.

  “This is the only spot they could have landed those helos.”

  “Yes,” Panther said, “which leaves us no room to land ours.”

  “What do you guys have?” Steele asked him.

  “UH-60s.”

  “We’re not going to land then. We’ll fast rope.” Steele tapped the pointer at three spots below the model’s ridgeline. “We’ll do it here, here, and here, and take them from the high ground. Agreed?”