by Larry Bond
Zeus looked at his uniform. It was light tan. He was an officer, a captain.
What did the insignia mean? Air force?
Would the airline have sent him?
We’re not at war. Relax.
The officer started to put out his hand; Zeus guessed that he was about to ask for his ID.
“I’m Murphy,” he admitted.
The Chinese officer said nothing, turning instead to Christian.
“You are Christian,” he said.
Christian had nearly crossed his eyes. He looked at Zeus, undoubtedly wondering why the hell he had agreed.
Play it through, Zeus thought. We’re businessmen.
“Mr. Christian?” repeated the officer.
“Yes?” said Christian finally.
“You are to come with me.”
The officer turned sharply. Two other men, these in blue uniforms, stood a short distance away, watching. Zeus noticed that they had unsnapped to the protective strap at the top of their holsters, allowing free access to their sidearms.
“What’s going on?” asked Christian.
The officer stopped abruptly. He wore a deep frown.
“You will follow me,” he said again, in a voice that brooked no argument.
3
UN building, New York City
Josh MacArthur reached into his pocket for a tissue to blow his nose before remembering that he had used the last one a few minutes ago. He closed his eyes as he sneezed, his whole body shaking with the force.
“Allergies,” he mumbled, getting up from his seat. “I just…need…a…tish — ”
He sneezed before he could finish the sentence.
Mumbling another apology, Josh made his way to the private restroom at the side of the office, pushing through the door as his body was wracked by a quick success of sneezes.
Damn allergies!
His allergies had saved his life in Vietnam. But on the whole, he would just as well do without them.
There were no more tissues in the box on the shelf above the sink. Josh grabbed a length of toilet paper and unfurled it, folding it over quickly and then trying to clear the mess from his nose. It was a lost cause, as were antihistamines, saline sprays, and all manner of remedies he’d tried over the years. Removing the allergen was the only real solution.
But what the hell was the allergen here, midway up the UN building, in the middle of a block of offices whose windows didn’t even open?
Josh sneezed again. He cleared his nose, dumped some of the paper into the toilet, and flushed. He sneezed, blew his nose, then felt his sinuses clear a bit.
Sneezing fit finally over, he turned to the sink and ran the cold water, splashing on it on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked more than a little worse for wear.
Josh patted his face dry — rubbing his eyes would only make them hurt even more — then took a deep breath, trying to relax.
There was a tap on the door.
“You, uh, all right in there, Josh?” asked William Jablonski, a political consultant to the President who’d been pressed into service as his minder and media adviser. Jablonski slurred the “sh”; with his deep voice, it sounded as if he were hushing him.
“Yeah, yeah. Just getting my breath back.”
“The reporters have a few more questions.”
“Yup.”
Josh sat on the closed seat of the toilet and unrolled some more toilet tissue. When he’d been stuck behind the lines in Vietnam, he’d dreamed of the chance to tell the world what he had seen. That goal had kept him going, kept him alive. But at this point he really could use a break. A little more of a rest.
The questions were the same, over and over. He repeated the answers practically word for word:
Where did this happen?
Vietnam, the jungles near the Chinese border.
You saw all of this with your own eyes?
Yes.
How did you escape?
I had a phone — some SEALs were sent. And I guess, uh, some Army guys.
The last answer was, if not quite a lie, certainly not the whole truth. CIA officer Mara Duncan had been the person who found him in the jungle and truly saved him — the CIA had tracked his phone signal, then sent Mara to find and rescue him. But mentioning her — mentioning the agency’s involvement at all — would blow her cover, ending her usefulness in Southeast Asia, and probably ending or at least harming her career.
So he left her out of the answers.
“Josh?” asked Jablonski through the door.
“Yeah?”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m good.”
“The people from WINS have, uh, a deadline thing that they are hoping to meet. They want to talk, uh, about the bridge.”
“I’ll be out in just a sec,” Josh told him.
“Sure.”
The bridge. Someone had tried to blow him up, to stop him from getting to the UN. Those questions were harder to answer, since he wasn’t exactly sure who it was.
He was sure — he saw the man in his mind’s eye: early twenties, thin face, shaved head. Chinese, definitely Chinese.
Determined expression. Cold, hollow eyes.
Can’t they all just go away?
Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself. The people in Vietnam whose bodies he’d seen — they would gladly trade places with him. Mạ, the little girl he’d rescued: What would she think?
Josh rose, blew his nose again, then opened the door.
“All right,” he said to the reporters as he emerged. “Where were we?”
4
Aboard the USS McLane, South China Sea
Dirk “Hurricane” Silas strode onto the bridge of the McLane, his legs adjusting unconsciously to the gentle roll of the vessel as she plied northward across the South China Sea. No other job in the world could compare with being the master of a ship: no post in the Navy came close to that of captain of a warship. And few moments could compare with those when Commander Silas stepped onto the deck of his bridge. The melding of crew and vessel was never more perfect than that moment, when a glance at the helmsman’s steady hand on the wheel told Silas that the world — that his world — was steady and shipshape.
Silas often thought that he had been born several generations too late; his lust for the sea belonged more properly to the age of sail, when the elements were more immediate and a captain might truly strain his muscles in rallying his crew. But a scan of the bridge of any of the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers would remind even a landlubber that this age had wonders of its own. For a man to stand on this bridge, to know that this ship was under his control, answered to his voice — it was a heady and humbling feeling, and one that Commander Silas had worked all his life to obtain.
“Captain.”
Lieutenant Commander Dorothy Li, Silas’s executive officer, had been taking her turn on the bridge while he grabbed a brief respite. She nodded at him now, and so the routine began: the exchange of data, the trivial and the critical details merging.
The actual give-and-take of commanding a vessel, of keeping her on her course, of making sure her sailors were nourished in mind and spirit and emotion — they were little chinks and dents that accreted against the real core of the thing, the clean sense of duty and honor and courage that informed the soul of a sea captain, of a warrior following a path set by the Norse and beyond. Silas put up with the chinks and dents, attended to the details, because he knew they were the dues he paid for that brief moment on the bridge. He adjusted things deftly, attending to the needs of his ship’s various departments.
He consulted immediately with the chief petty officer who had discovered an unexplained deficiency in the food stores. Ordinarily the chief was the calmest of men, at least in dealing with his commander, but he had become high-strung of late. Tonight, he couldn’t account for two steaks — they were the most important of the items allegedly missing. Silas was reminded of Humphrey Bogart in the Ca
ine Mutiny, and not in a particularly good way.
Almost surely it was an error in the tracking system or someone’s memory, Silas thought; he had no thieves aboard his ship.
It was the borderline hysteria that really bothered Silas. He dealt with it first by making a joke — perhaps the Chinese had somehow snuck aboard the ship — and when that failed to work, gave the chief a reassuring speech and a pat literally on the back. It was stress, he knew; they had been playing chicken with the Chinese now for several days, skirting the bastards’ bullying while obeying orders that prevented them from firing — from even defending themselves properly, in his opinion.
But that was hardly an excuse, and it was rather unseemly in a chief, a man who should be and was in many ways, part of the backbone of Silas’s command. The man would be eased out at Silas’s earliest opportunity. But that opportunity would not come for some time, surely, and as Silas needed him to function to his best ability, he would carry him until then, propping him up as best he could. A pat on the back was easy enough; if it could ease the pressure for a few hours, then Silas was all for it.
He went on to handle a few other minor matters, incidental bits of sand in the smooth grease of his warship’s gears. Internal matters squared away, he turned his attention to external — the real matter at hand.
For days now, they’d been shadowed by a Chinese cruiser and frigate. The Chinese spent most of the time sailing just over the horizon, ducking back and forth as he moved, sometimes across his course, more often dogging his stern. They had briefly attempted to block his path into Vietnam’s coastal waters — a move that could have started a war. They had threatened to interfere with his mission to send a helicopter to pick up a small group of SEALs rescuing some civilians — spies, he assumed, though the group included a small girl.
Whatever. The specifics of their mission didn’t interest him. More to the point was the principle that a U.S. warship went wherever it pleased. He hadn’t fired — doing so would have been against orders — but he had still managed to do his job and to prove the point.
Since then, the McLane had sailed northward toward the Gulf of Tonkin. She was back in international waters, about twenty miles off the Vietnamese coast. Silas’s orders were rather vague — remain off the coast of Vietnam — giving him considerable leeway, though in the end the lack of an actual mission frustrated him. Demonstrating America’s right to be there was hardly the sort of job one pined for.
And so, as he reviewed the evening intelligence briefing and saw the reports of the Chinese amphibious fleet at Hainan, it was not surprising that Silas concluded he did in fact have something to do, and that was to head farther north. For though he had been told not to seek a conflict with either of the two aircraft carriers the Chinese were operating near their home port of Zhenjiang, he had not been ordered away from the amphibious fleet. And in fact, a good naval man would certainly deem it advisable to investigate the whereabouts of that fleet. Certainly in the absence of orders against doing so.
After he had arranged it — and noted that there was no need to alert fleet to his intention, as they would be clear to any observant seaman, let alone to the admiral who was his commander — Silas left the bridge to feel the spray of the ocean. As he lifted the binoculars to his eyes, he thought there was no better feeling in the world than to be standing on the deck of a warship, making his way northward.
And if there was a better feeling, surely it would be his within a few days.
5
Hainan Island, China
Zeus felt his heart pound against his chest. He couldn’t slow it; the best he could do was control his breathing, taking deep, long breaths as he followed the Chinese military officer down the hallway. Christian was a few strides behind; the two Chinese soldiers were a pace or so to the rear.
The worst thing to do was panic. The Chinese had no way of knowing that they were involved in the attack; as long as he kept his mouth shut, they would ultimately have to release him.
Unless the Vietnamese spy had given them away. Then what?
Zeus slowed down another half step. “Let me do the talking,” he whispered to Christian.
“They’ll split us up,” said Christian. “And where’s the girl?”
The tremble was more pronounced, his voice unusually high.
“We’re here on business. Hong Kong. Then Tokyo. We’re businessmen,” said Zeus. “Stay with it.”
“Right.”
The cover story didn’t go very deep. How long would it take to get enough information for inconsistencies? Fifteen minutes? A half hour?
If Solt or one of the Vietnamese marines who’d been on the mission with them had been captured, the Chinese would expect them to lie. But there was no other alternative.
“Stick to the story,” Zeus whispered as the Chinese officer opened a steel door near the gate entrance hall.
“That bitch must’ve sold us out,” said Christian under his breath.
The door opened into a claustrophobically small room flooded with neon-bright light from above. Two men stood at the opposite end of the room. They wore blue fatigues with no insignias. To the right was a large corkboard covered with squares of paper tacked into neat rows. The squares were covered with Chinese characters, all unintelligible to Zeus.
The two men who had followed them came inside and closed the door.
“Passports,” said the officer.
As Zeus reached to his pocket, it occurred to him that it might just be a simple shakedown — not unheard of at small airports in China.
If so, he should slip some cash into the passport before he handed it over. But that was risky, too. The man might be insulted. Worse, it might be too little.
He gave him only the passport. Christian’s hand shook as he handed his over.
Buck up. Don’t go to pieces on me now.
“What’s this about?” Zeus asked calmly.
The officer ignored him, examining the documents. Though the room was small, it had a pair of air-conditioning vents, and it actually seemed cool.
The man said something in Chinese. The two men near the door, barely a foot away from Zeus, stiffened.
“Go with them,” the officer said to him.
“What is this about?” asked Zeus, a little harsher.
“Go.”
“Our passports.”
“Go.”
The officer stared so hard Zeus thought he was going to go crosseyed. The passports remained in his hand.
What would he do if Zeus grabbed them from his hand?
Fight.
Zeus could bowl him over with a swipe of his hand, a hard shot to his throat. Then push against the other two goons behind him, grab one of their guns. But that left the other two men for Christian.
The major had surprised him over the past few days, but he was worn down now, tired by everything they’d done.
And what would they do next? Even if they had their weapons?
One of the men opened the door and stepped back into the hallway. Zeus followed warily, trying to decide what to do next.
“What the hell are they up to?” asked Christian, walking alongside of him. “Are they arresting us? Or what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe they’re going to take us out and shoot us.”
Maybe, thought Zeus.
The man leading them walked toward the main part of the terminal. He took long strides. Zeus quickened his own pace, closing the distance. He glanced over his shoulder; Christian lagged nearly five yards behind, with the other guard a short distance behind him.
This seemed too casual for an arrest. But maybe that was the idea: keep things calm so there was less chance of trouble.
Zeus closed the distance between him and the Chinese soldier. He reached his hand up, plotting what he would do — grab the man’s shoulder, pull him around, hit him with his other fist. But before he was quite close enough, the soldier turned slightly and pushed against a glass door that led
to a set of steel stairs outside the building.
Zeus followed. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the harsh light; when they did, he saw an armored personnel carrier sitting about ten yards away. Light spilled from the interior. A half-dozen soldiers sat inside, assault guns between splayed legs, cigarette smoke wafting across the warm night air. There were more soldiers, and more vehicles, a short distance away.
“We are truly fucked,” said Christian, coming down the steps.
The man behind them said something in Chinese; probably Hurry up. Their guide was approaching a large two-and-a-half-ton truck beyond the APC.
Zeus rubbed his face. He’d missed his chance inside. With all these guards around, what the hell was he going to do?
And where the hell was Solt?
6
UN building, New York City
Mara Duncan stared at Josh MacArthur on the video, watching as he answered the questions from the correspondents a few rooms away. There was no sound; the video was streaming from a security unit, wired to cover the conference room in case of emergencies. But the lack of sound was perfect: it made it easier for Mara to watch him for some answer to the riddle of why she had fallen for the guy.
Because she was definitely attracted to him. Which didn’t make a lot of sense.
Mara swiveled in the chair. The small office was one of several backups scattered throughout the complex. Her UN security escort had ducked out to get them some lunch.
Josh was intellectual, a scientist. She was not. Not that she was dumb, by any means. Going by her grades in college, certainly, she was anything but a dope. But she preferred outdoor things like hiking and waterskiing and even parachute jumping to reading. And when she did read, it was more along the lines of a mystery or something, not a scientific treatise.
What she admired — what she loved — was the way he treated the little girl, Ma. He’d been so tenderly attentive and fiercely protective at the same time.
He had a good smile as well. Boyish. And shoulders — she liked his shoulders, though he wasn’t a bodybuilder type.