by Fritz Galt
The floor suddenly lurched sideways and the large Frenchman was thrown against a bank of consoles. “Mon Dieu,” he exclaimed. My God!
The floor began to rise and fall in rapid succession. He crouched low to maintain his balance. Through a tinted window, he saw vultures spring to flight. Dust puffed skyward as if slapped from a huge cushion.
He listened to every creak and groan as the walls of the control room threatened to buckle and break.
He didn’t trust Chinese technology in any form. He had insisted to the foreign ministry of the People’s Republic of China on experiencing the subterranean atomic detonation firsthand. But he hadn’t expected to be so close to the blast. Even if the Chinese had designed the control room to withstand the jolt, could the walls contain the more harmful effects of atomic blasts—the hellish heat, the flash burns and the poisonous radiation from neutrons and gamma rays?
“Impressed?” General Chou inquired in English.
Somewhat premature to ask, André thought. The room still rocked up and down. He checked the thick black hairs on his arms. His hair hadn’t fallen out. The room’s temperature hadn’t lost its pre-dawn chill.
Like ocean waves subsiding against a beach, the quaking dissipated against China’s western Takla Makau Desert. The air cleared and the sky returned to its former deep blue. Lizards crawled back into their holes all across the barren land.
The test site occupied wasteland, a region of ephemeral, disappearing marshes and lakes. Why the Chinese bothered to hold nuclear tests below ground was a mystery to him.
He removed a pair of goggles and thick eyeglasses and wiped off his sweat with a large handkerchief. “Can you deliver?”
“Absolutely.”
André wrote down the name of a ship. “Send it to the Alabaster. She’s currently offshore in the South China Sea. She belongs to my Hong Kong partner, Johnny Ouyang.”
“I know Johnny well,” General Chou said. “The People’s Liberation Army is a majority shareholder in his brokerage.”
André smiled. The Chinese couldn’t wait for the Hong Kong handover from the British. The entire country had bitten the apple of capitalism.
“Now for the price,” André said.
“Ah yes,” the general said. “The price.”
Around the room, technicians picked up chairs, straightened out consoles and wiped dust off their uniforms.
Suddenly it occurred to André that he had no idea what price to pay the Chinese. What was the going rate for a weapon that had taken 1.2 billion people over twenty years to produce?
He studied the sweat that soaked his handkerchief.
“General, how would you like Taiwan?”
SLIGHT BREEZES
Tuesday
Chapter 2
“How do you like the view?” May-lin asked.
Undercover CIA operative Alec Pierce paused his lanky frame on a wobbly mountain step and panted in the humid jungle heat. A wall of sweat washed over his forehead and stung his eyes.
He brushed his sandy-colored hair aside and looked up the full length of the young woman’s gawky, ivory legs. Taiwan could be a disorienting place, but for now the research geologist was in sharp focus.
“From here,” he said, “the view’s just fine.”
May-lin leaned on one knee and studied him. “You are a dirty old man.” She swept her bell-shaped culottes between her legs.
“I disagree,” he said between gasps for breath. “I’m only thirty-three.”
“I am trying to use an expression,” she said, and tucked her long black hair back under her baseball cap.
They had come to rest beside a series of waterfalls. Alec directed his gaze downward. Water bounded in an uncontrolled plunge from pool to pool. Stone bridges arched over the waterfalls as his trail snaked down the gorge past mossy rocks, tree-sized ferns and floating lotus leaves. Far below, ancient trees folded over the stream like the fingers of two hands. Beyond that, the surrounding ocean glistened in the noonday sun.
“Are we there yet, oh master?” he inquired.
“Soon. And I am not your master. I am your mistress.”
He drew up beside her and pulled his most rakish grin. “Did you call yourself my mistress?”
Her intense eyes studied him with incomprehension.
“Now we resume,” she said. Her vocabulary was straightforward and without nuance. Observing people in Taiwan in the past two years had taught Alec that the Chinese could be clever and even droll, but never ironic.
As he studied her heart-shaped face, he felt the presence of old Professor Lien like never before. With his half-closed eyes and the wisps of white hair clinging to his chin, the professor had recently redirected the course of Alec’s life. Alec’s mission with the CIA was simple: practice Chinese, understand Taiwan’s complex society and institutions, avoid the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), America’s pseudo-embassy, and follow whatever instructions Lien gave him. After a year, and for no obvious reason, the professor had assigned him to May-lin’s geology department.
Was Lien playing academic advisor or matchmaker?
Alec’s interest in May-lin was unequivocal. Dr. Hu May-lin’s disinterest had only served to intrigue him more. His slow penetration of her personal feelings and commitments ultimately led him to conclude that she had absolutely no personal feelings on any subject, and certainly none for him.
Then, long after he had abandoned all amorous aspirations, she had pivoted abruptly and invited him on that hike.
She returned to the climb and spoke over her shoulder. “The Lovers Temple is my favorite temple.”
“What kind is it?”
“Oh, a general temple. A little bit of everything. I hope you are not minding heights.”
He grabbed a chalky rock turned yellow by sulfur. One step back meant a fifty-foot fall to death. The young lady had an unusual appetite for danger.
At last, he heard a grunt, then a sigh of relief. She had reached the top. He squeezed his eyes shut and mounted the final hand-carved steps.
When he opened his eyes, he was on a terrace, with May-lin’s warm body close by. Even in nature, the Chinese had no personal space—not that he minded.
He ruffled his shirt to dissipate the heat. His heart was pounding. Then he began to choke. Incense billowed out of a nearby joss house. On its curving roof, exquisitely carved green dragons and feathery red fish protected the shrine from fire and water.
“Mind if we rest a while?”
“Yes.” She led him to a stone slab table. There they grabbed a couple of stone stools.
He removed a flask from his belt and gave her the first swig of water.
Gradually, his attention turned to the view beyond the clouds of incense. Taiwan’s green, volcanic hills were the stuff of ancient paintings. It was difficult to picture all the turmoil between the tiny island and the mainland, just ninety miles across the strait.
May-lin wiped her mouth and handed back the flask. He chugged it and shifted his attention to the temple.
Two men lingered inside. One dropped a pair of blocks on the stone floor and let out a cheer. One of the moon-shaped blocks must have landed face up and the other face down, so he could choose a prayer stick and read his fortune.
The temple was fascinating, but Alec wanted more peace and quiet. “Let’s find a little more privacy.”
May-lin didn’t seem to understand. “Is this not private?”
“Not enough for what I have in mind.”
She hesitated and fingered the shoulder straps of her Spandex tank top. A line of perspiration seeped between her breasts.
“I see that you are looking at my blouse,” she said.
“I have been for quite a while. Nice fabric.”
“Thank you. I am buying him in Hong Kong.”
“I like the way he stretches.” He looked in wonder at her shining eyes.
Then he realized that the prayer blocks had stopped.
May-lin’s gaze tore away from him as two
shadows, one thin and one wide, fell on him.
He felt long fingernails press into his shoulder.
“Foreigner,” a tight voice said in Chinese into his ear.
Alec stood up.
A wraithlike man as thin as bamboo had a hand on him and studied Alec with cold eyes.
Another Chinese man chewed a wad of blood-red betel nut and was working himself into a frenzy. “You do not belong with a Chinese woman,” the fat guy hissed with a heavy Fujian accent.
The thin man spun around and punched Alec in the solar plexus. Alec’s heels caught on his stool, and he fell over backward onto the table. May-lin shrieked as she jumped away.
Alec slowly rolled off the table and rubbed the pain in his chest. A wheeze welled up within him, but he fought to suppress it.
He lurched away from the table to divert attention away from May-lin. It worked. The men stalked him. No words were spoken. Racial bigotry had been asserted, and the issue would be mediated through violence.
Alec didn’t know their combat style. But he could guess.
He had one thing in his favor. He was calm, and it was easier to handle someone who couldn’t control his emotions.
Two kicks from the stout legs of the angry one into Alec’s throat sent him reeling on the flagstone terrace. He got up on one knee, felt his throat for damage, and looked up at them.
The men moved in, calculating. They seemed to be driven by more than xenophobia.
Then the thin man took a second run at him. A propeller of knife-like hands sliced toward him. Alec shot a foot out and aimed for the man’s chest. He gained some leverage and managed to divert the man’s chi, or force, hurling him away.
May-lin was screaming something in dialect.
The thin man rolled onto his feet in one smooth motion.
Alec stood upright, his back to the drop-off. It was time to take the initiative. He charged toward the man with the razor blade hands.
At that very instant, the man with the blood-red lips jumped at him.
Alec felt a gust of wind and caught a blur of color flying past behind him.
Alec had neatly sidestepped the lunge.
A moment later, an agonized shriek fell away below him.
The thin man froze.
The fat, flailing body disappeared from view. Alec only heard an abrupt swish of leaves like the hungry chomp of a plant, then a pulpy thud on solid stone. There was no cry.
The thin man fled down the steps after his buddy.
Alec felt an onrush of dizziness and dropped to one knee. The other knee was dripping blood.
May-lin approached with caution.
“Just remind me.” He tried to dislodge what felt like crushed cartilage in his larynx. “Why did we come here?”
“I am sorry,” she said in tears. “He was my fault.”
Chapter 3
“You what?” Mick Pierce scrutinized his younger but taller half-brother before entering a covered market.
“I stepped out of the way.” Alec tried to explain in self-defense, and took a step forward to demonstrate. “The fat guy rushed past me. I swear I didn’t touch him. He just threw himself off the cliff and fell to his death.”
“‘Just threw himself off the cliff,’” Mick repeated. He could see putting that one on an official security report.
The odor of dead and dying animals wafted under their noses from the market. After two years on the island, Mick was still unused to the smell.
“Did you at least try to stop him?” he asked.
Alec glanced around Mick’s neighborhood market, holding his throat and looking wretched. “Jesus, it wasn’t my idea. Before I knew it, he was past me and flying through the air. The sound of his body smacking the ground—”
“Okay, spare me the details.” He got it.
Mick plunged inside. Vendor stalls overflowed with green onions and less identifiable leafy vegetables.
“Wait a second, Mick. You’ve killed men before.”
Mick kept walking. He looked down at his powerful hands, a gift from his Native American mother. His arms bulged with muscles created in a gym. “No, I don’t kill people,” he shot over his shoulder.
“Huh? Haven’t you ever done it in the military?” Alec asked, pursuing him.
“Done it?” Mick shook his head. He had spent four years as a U.S. Marine forward deployed around the globe, and he had never seen combat duty, apparently to his detriment.
Alec stopped, confused. “I was there in Beirut with you.”
Mick returned to him. The look on Alec’s face changed as he seemed to realize that Mick had never killed a man before, even while the two served side by side in the CIA.
“Yugoslavia?” Alec suggested.
Mick shook his head.
“Hell, it was a slaughterhouse. Everyone took part in it.”
“Well, not me,” Mick said, and started into the poultry section where a vendor wrung the head off a frightened chicken. “Tell me,” Mick asked, heading past cages of squawking birds. “What was it like?”
“What, today?” Alec said. “I just stepped out of his way.”
“No. In the past.” After all, Mick’s half-brother had shot his way out of an extermination camp, slit the throats of peacekeepers and performed many other nasty deeds for his country.
“Mick, those were killers in Lebanon and Yugoslavia. They all were. They’d kill me for my shoelaces.”
Mick stared at the rows of fish, eels and squid on ice. “So you’d kill them preemptively?”
“Sure,” Alec said.
Mick fingered his belt as if he were looking for a holster. His hands were cold and numb. He shook his head and tried to ignore the sweat that poured down his neck and back.
He headed for the dark end of the building. Something important had snapped within him years before, and he still felt damaged inside.
“C’mon, Mick. Certainly you could kill a proven murderer.”
“Could I?”
The dead pig swinging by its hind legs stared him in the face.
He paused.
Alec had touched on the central question in Mick’s life, his greatest self-doubt and the driving force behind his actions. Every day of his life, Mick strove to avoid situations where he might be forced to kill a man. And yet, he clung to his job as a CIA operative precisely to confront that fear, day in and day out.
Looking back at his half-brother, Mick was flooded with memories.
Memories of helplessness. The dying words of Mick’s Pueblo Indian mother were, “Life isn’t fair, Mickey. Don’t fight it.”
But he had fought it. He had tried to keep life fair, set things right whenever he could. He fought for balance as if virtue alone would fend off the circling sharks of mortality.
Setting things right was a weak weapon, probably not a weapon at all. It was more like a bargaining chip. And taking someone else’s life broke his end of the bargain big time.
A butcher heaved a cleaver into a slab of pork, and the quivering flesh peeled away.
Mick closed his eyes and staggered across the wet, slippery floor.
“Mick, this is your job. You’ve got to be able to do your job.”
“I know. Don’t remind me.”
“There’ll come a time when other people’s lives depend on you. What will you do then?”
“I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Man,” Alec said. “You’re like a walking time bomb.”
“Worse. I’m a damp fuse.”
Alec let out a sigh of exasperation. “Remind me never to call on you in a time of crisis.”
“It’s a deal,” Mick said. “I might carry a gun, but that doesn’t mean I’ll use it.”
André sat frozen beside General Chou in the back seat of the Russian-made Zil as the general’s chauffeur raced headlong down the narrow Beijing alley. The lane ahead was crowded with people eating at tables and washing their clothes. Bicycles careened back and forth with the unpredictability of falling leaves
. The driver seemed to leave it to fate to determine whether they avoided being crushed by his onrushing car.
André finally took his eyes off the road. “Any questions?” he asked before they reached the international airport. After he had proposed Taiwan as a sweetener to the nuclear deal, he could tell that General Chou was relieved that he wasn’t posing as another front for the Pakistanis.
“Yes, I have a few questions,” General Chou stated with a wooden face. “For example, how could I possibly get Taiwan?”
“Think outside the box,” André said. “Use your imagination.”
The driver guided them into a wider stream of traffic–taxis, bread trucks and silent bicycles–on Jianguo Men Wai Avenue.
“I see no military way to capture Taiwan,” the general said. “We don’t have the weapons or the lift capacity, and our troops aren’t adequately skilled to invade. We can’t threaten Taiwan any more than they can threaten us.”
André watched the city through his side window. Incongruously, Beijing reminded him of Las Vegas. It was a large, spread-out, and dusty city. Much like Las Vegas, it had big hotels eyeing each other jealously. Company logos flashed on neon signs atop every high-rise. It sat on the edge of a great desert. And, like Las Vegas, it was a potential jackpot.
“Rid yourself for a moment of your military orientation,” André said, “and see Taiwan as a social and economic laboratory.”
He closed the curtain to his window and pulled a wrinkled map out of his worn, leather briefcase.
In the serenity of the limousine, the two men looked over Taiwan. It was a kidney-shaped island ninety miles off China’s southeast coast. Like protective arms, impregnable mountains surrounded its northern and eastern sides and cradled the coastal plain to the west. Cities lined the west coast of the island like a string of pearls, the largest and most northern of which was Taipei. “Before invading Taiwan, we must weaken it internally and undermine it defensively.”
General Chou nodded tentatively.
“To weaken it internally,” André said, jabbing his finger at the center of the island, “we need civil war in Taiwan.”