by Larry Bond
Zeus tried to explain that he had to get to the U.S. embassy—he thought mentioning the prison might be problematic—but neither man spoke English. He showed them the passes the Vietnamese had given him; one of the soldiers took the papers and laminated card, frowned deeply, then started to walk back to the truck.
“Wait,” said Zeus. He opened the door and got out of the car. He had been told several times not to get separated from his paperwork—the passes might be very valuable to anyone seeking to escape over the border.
The man ignored him. Zeus followed him to the truck; the other soldier stayed behind and began examining the car.
There was a portable radio unit in the cab of the truck. The soldier pulled it out and held it up, apparently radioing for instructions. He continued to ignore Zeus, not even glancing in his direction.
The soldier fell silent, listening. Then finally he put the radio back down in the truck. Whatever the man on the other side of the conversation said didn’t seem to settle the matter, for not only did he keep the papers but he continued to ignore Zeus, walking toward his companion.
“All right, so are we going to move this thing?” asked Zeus.
Neither man acknowledged him as they exchanged a few words. Apparently Zeus’s car had passed muster, since the man who’d looked it over had closed the driver’s door and made no move to stop Zeus as he approached.
“Đ” said Zeus. “Go?” He motioned with his hands. “If you move the truck—”
Zeus pantomimed driving away, then pointed at the truck. Nothing seemed to work; both men stared at him blankly.
“All right—give me my papers,” he told them. He was still speaking English, of course, but his gestures made what he wanted obvious. When the soldier didn’t hand them over, Zeus reached and took them, his anger starting to grow. The man resisted only slightly—even if he had no idea who Zeus was, the fact that the American had a pass from the man’s commander in chief surely had some weight.
There was a deep ditch on one side of the road and a curb on the other; the truck was situated in a way that there was no getting around it. Zeus started the car and turned to back up. The soldiers finally came alive, yelling at him. Now it was his turn to ignore them. He stepped on the gas, backing up quickly to get away. He glanced up to make sure they weren’t aiming their guns at him—the weapons remained slung over their shoulders—and then started to back into a U-turn.
He’d just completed it and started to straighten out the wheel when a pickup truck turned into the intersection below. Zeus edged toward the far side of the right lane as the truck approached, horn blaring and lights flashing. Suddenly the truck veered across his path. Zeus hit the brakes.
“Shit,” he cursed, reaching for his pistol. The other driver jumped from the truck, waving his hands.
It was Major Chaū, the translator Trung had assigned to help him.
“Major Zeus!” shouted Chaū. “Finally! I have been looking around the city since this morning.”
“Chaū? Where’s Anna? I need to find her … General Trung—”
“I will take you. Come now; we need to go to Van Tri.”
“Van Tri? The golf club?”
“Yes, yes—I believe that is where she is.”
* * *
Van Tri was a private golf club, the only private golf club in the country, in fact. Being held at a country club, even one in Vietnam, had to be worlds better than being held in a military prison, where Zeus had been led to believe Anna was.
But he quickly realized there was little reason to be optimistic as soon as they arrived. The army was here in force, and the gate was guarded by an officious captain who seemed to care little that Chaū outranked him. It took Major Chaū a good five minutes to get the man to call his superior, and even then he had to raise his voice and invoke Trung’s name several times before they were admitted.
Bad signs, not just for retrieving Anna, but for the war effort.
A sergeant met them in front of the clubhouse, an elaborate set of interconnected buildings and pavilions surrounding a pool. The man greeted them with a silent salute, spun on his heel and led them into the two-story building at the front of the cluster. They walked straight through to a cement portico and turned right, heading around the pool to a second building.
Zeus thought for a moment that he might see Anna. He imagined himself holding her—he lost himself for a moment in the anticipation, heart racing as the sergeant pulled open the door.
The sergeant stayed behind as they entered a room set up as an office, with a row of two-draw high vertical files on the left and a large desk in the middle.
“Should we go in?” Zeus asked, pointing to the open doorway in the partition at the back of the room.
Chaū hesitated; by the time he answered, “I don’t know,” Zeus had already reached the doorway. But it was clear even before he stepped through that no one was there; the space was completely empty.
“Are they coming to us?” Zeus asked Chaū.
“I’m not sure,” said Chaū. “I don’t know anyone here.”
The door at the front of the small building opened. A captain entered, then stepped aside, making way for an officer so tall that his head was in danger of hitting the top of the doorway. The man, a colonel, would have been tall even in the U.S., but in Vietnam he rated as a giant.
The captain began speaking in rapid Vietnamese. Chaū answered directly to the colonel.
“What’s going on?” Zeus asked Chaū.
Chaū held him off with a gesture of his hand while he continued to press his point with the colonel. Zeus’s anger began to rise. He could shoot the son of a bitch, him and his punk-faced captain, take over these idiots’ prison, and free Anna himself.
“Anna isn’t here,” said Chaū finally.
“Where is she?”
“He doesn’t know.”
Something in Chaū’s voice warned Zeus not to ask any more questions—Zeus guessed it was because one or both of the other officers spoke English and he was afraid that Zeus would say something that might anger them.
But Zeus was angry himself.
“I’m not leaving here without Anna,” he told the colonel. “General Trung himself said she would be released to me. You’re not going to disobey him, are you?”
The colonel frowned but didn’t respond. Zeus turned to Chaū.
“Tell him. Tell him to comply.”
“We do not have the girl,” said the captain in thickly accented English.
“Well, where is she?” demanded Zeus.
The captain said something Vietnamese to Chaū.
“He’s insisting she was sent to Hanoi,” explained Chaū. “That can’t be … I’d have known.”
“We should look over their prisoners. Maybe the identity is mistaken,” Zeus added.
“Yes.”
The possibility of a mistake gave them a face-saving way to produce Anna, but it didn’t work. The captain continued to insist that they had sent her to Hanoi.
Zeus continued to insist that they show him the other prisoners. Finally, the colonel frowned, raised his hand, and left.
“All right,” said the captain. “Come then.”
Zeus and Chaū followed him out of the building and across the patio to the last building in the small complex. Zeus was surprised when they continued past the building in the direction of a pair of troop trucks parked in the rough of the nearby golf course. At first, he thought that the captain was going to use the truck to take them to the actual prison. It wasn’t until the captain pulled aside the tarp at the back of one of the trucks that Zeus realized the vehicles themselves were the holding cells. Two dozen people, all bound hand and foot and chained together, sat in the truck. A few stared at him; the others dozed or gazed aimlessly at the canvas at the top of the truck. The captain barked orders, apparently telling them to rise. A few struggled to do so, but it was hopeless; they were either too tired or too closely bound to make more than a token effort.
“Anna?” said Zeus, “Anna, are you there?”
He craned his neck, then pulled himself up onto the bar that formed the rear bumper and looked the prisoners over. She wasn’t there.
Zeus jumped back down. He followed silently to the second truck. How many of these people, he wondered, were guilty of what Anna had done—their jobs? Prosecuting a doctor for trying to save a life was surely not the way to win a war.
There were more inmates in the second truck, and if anything they were in an even more pathetic state. The stench of human waste nearly knocked Zeus over. But he climbed up onto the back of the truck, glanced around, and called Anna’s name several times before giving up. The people seemed in such a bad way, he was tempted to claim one was her.
“So you see, we do not harbor her,” said the captain.
As Chaū and the captain talked, Zeus tried to focus his thoughts on what to do next. If he was going to catch the helicopter, he had to get back soon. It might already be too late.
Love or duty? How did a man choose?
Duty first. Always. Yet in his heart, she was what he wanted.
“Major?”
Zeus snapped out of his thoughts. He was surprised to see that the captain had left them.
“I’m not sure what to do,” said Chaū. “We can go back to Hanoi and I can make calls.”
“What about Nam Hong prison?” said Zeus.
Chaū got a funny look on his face. “Nam Hong?”
“Someone told me I should look there.”
“I doubt she’s there. I don’t think so, no.”
“Let’s see for ourselves anyway.”
“Major, we can, but it’s probably a waste of time.”
“Let’s go there anyway,” said Zeus.
“If you wish.”
12
Hanoi
Kerfer plopped down in the chair.
“About fuckin’ time you got back to me,” he said as he pulled on the headset. “What the hell do you people in Washington do?”
“We’re having an orgy in the office, Ric,” said Mara Duncan. “What the hell do you think?”
“I think I’m in the middle of a fuckin’ war and I expect some backup,” said Kerfer. He knew he was being over-the-top cranky, but in his experience that was the only way to deal with the agency. If you didn’t go balls-to-the-wall with them and hit them hard, they never paid attention to you.
Besides, she should have gotten right back to him, not made him sit in the stinking embassy basement jerking off. What if his life had been on the line?
The video on the screen showed nothing beyond Mara’s face. The program blanked out the back of the room behind her. If she moved too quickly back, her features blurred, as if it were some sort of funhouse mirror effect.
Fortunately, she tended to sit in one place and stare at the small camera he imagined was at the top of her monitor.
Not the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, but she’d do. She was a tough one in a clinch.
“I need to talk to a guy I worked with,” Kerfer told Mara. “I know he’s with the agency.”
“Who?”
“Roth Setco.”
“Roth?” She threw her head straight back; her eyes merged with her chest. “Why?”
“Murph has an idea.”
“Major Murphy?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought he was in the hospital.”
“He’s out. The Vietnamese are planning to attack north. He wants to set up something to go further. It’s actually a pretty good idea. Setco and I did something similar in Malaysia.”
“You were in Malaysia?”
“You don’t have my résumé?”
“It’s not in there.”
* * *
As Kerfer explained Murphy’s plan, Mara reached over to the keyboard of her computer and began punching up files. Kerfer’s assessment of the typical security arrangements seemed overly optimistic, even to Mara, who had dealt with the Chinese in Malaysia up close and personally. She keyed in the access codes to the briefing data on Chinese army headquarters from memory, even though she hadn’t looked at the files since coming to the States, and began paging through.
When she found Kunming, she tapped in the most recent satellite images and then the running blog data of intel assessments connected to the headquarters. There were way too many entries to even scan easily, and so she had to add different filters to make the list more manageable.
In the meantime, Kerfer outlined a mission that would last no more than two hours, in and out. The core was breathtakingly simple; once past the outer ring of guards, security was light—typically two men at or near the door, then a single one in the hall beyond.
Mara saw a reference in an agency document to an exercise that had been conducted to test the contingencies of hitting a Chinese corps-level headquarters. It had been undertaken by a Japanese special operations team and a platoon of SEALs; the report author’s initials were R. K.
Not a coincidence, she guessed.
“All right?” said Kerfer. “You gonna hook me up with Setco or what?”
“I don’t understand. This is a SEAL operation?”
“I don’t think we can get it approved,” said Kerfer. “WARCOM’s gonna balk. You guys can help run it. I know Setco’s got people.”
“He’s in Thailand.”
“A half hour away by plane.”
Mara shook her head, the edges fuzzing. “I can do it.”
Kerfer didn’t answer right away—naturally, because he didn’t think that a woman could run a black op. Asshole.
Mara started working details in her head—she had already had some of her best contacts lost during the conflict. But there were plenty of people available. A dozen Korean mercenaries were sitting around getting wasted in Myanmar at the moment, smoking white tiger weed and having hallucinations.
Dependable enough if you sobered them up, willing enough if you promised them enough money.
“No offense, but I’ve never worked with you,” said Kerfer. “I have worked with Setco.”
“Where? On training missions?”
“Screw you.”
“And why do you think an army corps command is going to be as easy to hit as a Chinese army command?” added Mara. “I know you studied the corps—”
“First of all, the way the Chinese are organized, their idea of a regional army is a corps command,” said Kerfer. “In our terms. The equivalent. You don’t fuckin’ know that? Shit.”
Mara felt herself flush. She was out of her depth when it came to talking about army organization—to be honest, she had only the barest textbook understanding of what a corps actually was—two or more divisions working together in an army command. Kerfer had found her weakness, one of them anyway.
“I can get intel,” she said defensively.
Why was she back on her heels? Why was she feeling embarrassed? The hell with Kerfer—she’d seen more shit in Malaysia than he had in his entire career, she was sure of it. Goddamn SEAL blowhard.
“If we’re going to pull this off, it’s gotta come together fast,” said Kerfer. “The Viets are ready to move. So either get me in touch with Setco or get over here yourself.”
“What’s your command going to say when we ask permission to use you?”
“Why the hell would you ask anyone permission?” demanded Kerfer indignantly. “Get me fucking Setco’s contact info, would you?”
“Calm down, Ric,” snapped Mara. “Take a deep fucking breath, and let’s see what we can come up with.”
13
Kunming, China
Li Sun, freshly promoted to two-star general from the rank of colonel, looked around the staff room. Yesterday, every one of the dozen men staring at him with barely disguised contempt outranked him. Now he was their superior.
And yet, being their boss did not make him their leader. It took nothing to guess that they did not respect him. He was sure that, to a man, they believed his promotion was due
entirely to the fact that he was the premier’s nephew.
Certainly, there was truth in that. But the greater truth was the fact that the offensive had stalled. It had stalled because these men were mice. They were timid holdovers from the antique times—remnants of the age when America had ruled the world.
Now it was China’s turn. The new generation—Li Sun’s generation—would push the old West out of the way.
The commander of Army Group South Two, General Cài Ming, had been recalled to Beijing, where the premier would present him with a choice: resignation from the army in shame, or quiet suicide with a guaranteed pension for his family.
Li Sun believed the old general was such a coward that he would resign. That probably would not save him: The premier did not particularly like to have old generals available for the opposition to rally around.
But that was not Li Sun’s concern. He had to deal with these men, the division commanders and top staff for what had now been designated as the Eighth Chinese Expeditionary Army Group—a title chosen by Li Sun for its appropriateness: bā (Pinyin for eight) signified prosperity and had long been associated with good luck and the empire. Thus in one fell swoop the unit was linked with the past and the future. It made considerably more sense than the dull association with the region that had been used in the past.
Li Sun turned to a map of Southeast Asia, encompassing a good portion of southern China as well as Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam south to Hue. Large red pins marked the location of the Chinese troops in western and eastern Vietnam. The markers that showed the goals of the advance by this date of the battle—considerably farther south—had been removed before Li Sun’s arrival. He had ordered them restored, a reminder of the generals’ collective failure.
Army Group South 2 had taken a purely defensive posture, spreading its forces along the border. From the beginning of the war, the group’s three divisions had been profoundly unaggressive. A few units had moved a few hundred meters over the border. The rest had simply dug in.
Li Sun had spent the last twenty-four hours studying the situation. While admittedly the group had been given a small role in the overall attack, it had wasted even that. To Li Sun’s disappointment, he had reached the conclusion that the divisions closest to the front could not be moved quickly. So he had devised an elaborate plan to take three different divisions, which had been reserves, and put them on the offensive. As the drive proceeded, he would move units piecemeal from those on the border, feeding them in to fuel his attack on Hanoi.