by Larry Bond
“All along, the Vietnamese have been very adept at manipulating public opinion,” said Xi Hing Lee, a Chinese representative to the UN. “They have posted things on YouTube that are clearly fake.”
“And I guess the missile on the bridge was made up, too?” said Josh aloud.
“Not here,” said the marshal, in a gruff, though barely audible voice.
Josh continued reading. The story basically called him a liar, reporting the Chinese claims that the talk of atrocities was propaganda initiated by the Vietnamese.
He folded the newspaper beneath his arm as calmly as he could, took a small sip of coffee, then left the shop. This time, the marshal stayed with him as he walked down the street.
“What the hell?” said Josh, turning toward him. “I mean, what the hell?”
“Ah. Never believe what you read in the papers.”
“How can they think I made it up? I gave them a video for crap’s sake.”
His bodyguard shrugged.
Josh shook his head. He was walking back in the direction of the hotel, but he was too mad to go back to his room — he needed to burn off some energy. He reversed course, steaming back past the bagel shop practically at flank speed.
“You can’t take shit like this personally, kid,” said the marshal finally. He was taller than Josh, but he seemed to be having trouble keeping up.
“You like being called a liar?” Josh asked.
“Well — ”
“Yeah. That’s exactly my point.”
12
Beihai Airport, China
Zeus saw in slow motion:
Christian punching the policeman, the policeman falling against his comrade, Christian launching another punch, this one catching the man full in the face and throwing him backward.
Bowled over by his comrade, the second policeman sprawled on the ground. Zeus’s first instinct was to reach down and help him up, but as he did, the man began pushing himself backward to get away.
“It’s all right,” said Zeus. “This is all a mistake. It’s just a mistake.”
The frightened policeman had a whistle attached to a ring on one of his fingers. He put his hand to his mouth and began to blow.
“Damn you!” yelled Christian.
Zeus grabbed him before he could kick the policeman. He pushed Christian back against the wall.
“This is just a big misunderstanding,” yelled Zeus, still thinking he could calm the situation.
But it had gone far beyond that — the other policeman reached to his holster for his gun.
“We gotta get out of here!” yelled Christian. He slipped from Zeus’s grasp and ran down the hall toward the door.
Zeus saw the officer pulling the gun out. He took two steps and kicked it away. Then he started running. Shouts and whistles echoed through the hall. The passengers in the room crowded around the door, gaping as Zeus passed.
Christian flew through the door to the outside. Zeus followed. There was no other choice; running was the only option now.
Eventually, though, he was going to kick Christian’s head in.
Zeus hit the door with his left shoulder, jolting it open. The two policemen who’d been outside were yelling at Christian to stop. The one on the right raised his pistol to fire. Zeus launched himself at the man. He hit him hard in the back, toppling him over. The gun fired, then flew from the cop’s hand as he hit the pavement. Zeus scrambled after it, scooping it up in his right hand before jumping to his feet.
Where the hell is Christian?
Zeus saw someone beyond the circle of light running behind the dark shadow of the nearby bus. He threw himself forward, tripping, but then regaining his balance. He pumped his legs. They felt as if they were thigh-deep in mud, each stride an effort. His heart pumped hard in his chest, the beats thick in his throat as he ran for the bus.
“Christian! For crap’s sake, where the hell are you!” he yelled. “Christian!”
There was no answer, or at least none that he could hear. But the second bus pulled out from around the first. Zeus veered toward it, still running at top speed. The bus lurched, then slowed, its door open.
Zeus heard a pair of gunshots just as he reached the vehicle. He grabbed the bar inside the door and pulled himself up, holding on as Christian stepped on the gas.
“What the hell are you doing?” Zeus yelled.
“Getting the hell out of here! You got any better ideas?”
They barreled down the apron area for a few hundred feet, lights off, then veered left as Christian ran out of pavement. The bus tipped hard on its wheels, squealing ferociously but remaining upright.
“Where are you going?” demanded Zeus.
“Out of here!”
“You’re heading for the runway.”
“Tell me something better.”
A white light cut across their path. The bus began to shake. The white turned black, then flashed red. A plane passed overhead so close Zeus thought it was going through them.
By the time Christian reacted the plane had already passed. He braked hard, then overcorrected as the bus veered left. They fishtailed back and forth. Zeus flew to the floor, arms curled around his head. He was sure they were going to roll over. But somehow the bus remained on all four wheels, weaving a little less wildly as Christian fought to find something approaching a straight line. By the time Zeus got to his feet, Christian had found a service road. There was a fence ahead; beyond it, an open field.
Christian headed straight for the fence.
“What!” yelled Zeus.
Christian didn’t answer.
“Stay on the road! Turn!” yelled Zeus.
Christian, eyes glazed, drove straight through the fence. The bus wheezed as it went down a short hill. Shaking and groaning, its front wheels sunk into the loose dirt as it hit the field, but the vehicle had enough momentum to keep going, plowing through a shallow irrigation ditch and then continuing into a field.
In better days there would have been wheat or soybeans here, but the land was dry and hard-packed by the lack of rain over the past two years. The bus plowed on, hurling dust in a whirlwind around them. They continued across for a good three or four hundred feet, until they drove into a second ditch. This one was deep enough for the front bumper of the bus to strike the embankment as it came to the bottom. The bumper ground into the earth like a spear and the back of the bus flew to the right. For a moment it seemed to Zeus that he was flying. Time stopped in midair, everything frozen. All of his thoughts were frozen before him, snippets and shards of ideas and sensations: the war, the U.S., his prize Corvette, Solt Jan — they were all there around him, like playing cards spread out on a table.
Then time went fast again. The bus crashed onto its side with a thud. Zeus sprawled against the glass, bashing his face as he fell. His knee hit the top of a seatback as he fell, and he felt his kneecap pop. He rolled through the bus, arms flailing as he tried to grab a handhold.
Zeus lost his breath, his side collapsing from a sharp blow against the side of something in the bus. He fell on his back, trying to will his diaphragm and lungs to work again. He squeezed and squeezed until realizing that was exactly the wrong thing to do. He relaxed and his breath came back.
His vision widened from the black dot it had fled to. He saw the bus’s interior, dust filtering in a yellowish-red glow that came from the dash lights and the LEDs on the floor and ceiling.
Christian groaned behind him.
“We have to get the hell out of here,” said Zeus, getting to his knees. He rose and moved tentatively down the row of windows to one marked with red LEDs. He put his hands on the bottom, and pushed. His left wrist hurt; he wedged his elbow against the frame instead and popped out the emergency window.
“You comin’?” he yelled, climbing halfway out.
Christian groaned in response. Zeus looked around. The airport was straight ahead, quiet in the distance, at least for the moment.
There was a highway not fifty yards away
, up a slight hill.
“Come on,” said Zeus, ducking back into the bus. “There’s a road.”
Christian groaned on his right, near the back of the bus.
“How the hell did you get back here?” Zeus said, crawling toward him. “Win, come on. We gotta get out of here. There’s a road.”
Christian raised his head and turned toward Zeus. He blinked his eyes.
It wasn’t Christian — it was the bus driver.
Shit, thought Zeus, backing away.
“Christian?”
“I’m here.” Christian rose from the stairwell near the driver’s seat. “What the hell?”
“Yeah, what the hell. That’s my feeling exactly.”
“Where are we?” muttered Christian.
“In deep shit, and headed deeper,” said Zeus. “Come on. We gotta get out before they find us.”
“Where?”
“There’s a road up there. We’ll find someplace to hide or something.”
Zeus waited by the open window as Christian clambered toward him.
“Here’s your gun,” said Christian, handing over the pistol. He’d found it on the way.
Zeus grabbed it. “You’re lucky I don’t shoot you with it.”
* * *
Zeus left the driver — there was nothing he could tell the authorities that they wouldn’t already know.
They crossed the highway, walking in the direction of lights about a mile farther north. Zeus had only the vaguest idea of where they were, and no real plan on what to do next. They had no equipment, no phones, no GPS, no secret decoder ring’s or Enterprise communicators that would beam them up to safety.
Beijing and the embassy was probably their best bet, but getting there would be next to impossible. They had their passports, but those would surely identify them as the criminals who had caused such havoc in Beihai. They had only American money, and not all that much of that. Neither Zeus nor Christian spoke Chinese, and from what he’d heard and had seen already, it was unlikely they’d find many people who spoke English, at least until they got to a large city.
“You think we can find a car or something at one of those houses?” asked Christian as they got closer to the lights.
“I dunno,” said Zeus.
“Can you hot-wire a car?”
Zeus could hot-wire a car, as a matter of fact, bypassing the key solenoid; it wasn’t that hard on most cars. At least not on the older cars that he had worked on and restored since he was thirteen. But could he do it to whatever little econobox rice-burner they found? And could he do it in the dark, without anyone seeing them?
Those were the more pertinent questions, and Zeus had no answer to them.
Stealing a car made sense, or would have, if there had been cars near any of the three houses and two farm buildings clustered around a fork in the road. The only vehicles they could find were bicycles, parked neatly against the side of the smallest of the three houses. Christian complained about his ankle, wondering if it would be up to pedaling.
“Suck it up,” said Zeus, whose entire body was covered with bruises and welts. He took one of the bikes and pushed it as quietly as possible from the house toward the road. Christian eventually followed.
They rode along the dirt road for a few miles, moving roughly north. After about fifteen minutes, Zeus spotted a long highway overpass ahead. The highway crossed over the local road, veering through the hills. He rode under and beyond it, vainly hoping there would be an access ramp. When he realized there wasn’t, he turned and went back to the stone and rubble embankment below the overpass. There he got off the bike and began hauling it up the hill toward the highway.
The bicycle was a heavy Chinese model, built to withstand the rugged roads of the Chinese countryside and small cities; it was not light. Christian groaned as he slipped sideways up the hill.
A truck whizzed by as Zeus reached the top. The highway was a two-lane national road, recently repaved. There was a wide shoulder next to the guardrail, and at the moment at least no other cars or trucks in sight. Zeus put his bike on the pavement and began pedaling.
“Are we allowed to ride on this?” said Christian, huffing as he caught up.
Zeus didn’t answer.
“Hey, are we going to get stopped?”
“Do I look like a traffic cop?” snapped Zeus.
“I’m just asking.”
Zeus concentrated on pedaling, pushing down his legs in long strokes. His kneecap was feeling odd. Not hurt, exactly; it was more like someone had taken it off and put it back on wrong.
After they had been riding for about ten minutes, they saw the glow of lights in the distance. Zeus lowered his head and began pedaling in earnest, pumping his legs and ignoring as much as possible the stitch developing in his side. He focused only on the pavement immediately in front of him. The world narrowed to the rush of wind around his head. Finally, the pain at his side was too much. He eased his pace and looked up, gazing into the distance at his goal.
It wasn’t a city as he had thought. It was a pulloff, a truck stop, similar to those in the States. A small, well-lit building sat on a slight rise to the right in front of a sea of cement. Brightly colored fuel pumps stood like buoys near the building.
Four semitrailers and six large, open, and canvas-covered trucks were idling at the side of the road.
Opportunity knocks, Zeus thought.
Zeus rode along the side of the road until just short of the rest stop. Gliding to a stop, he picked up the bike and dropped it over the rail into the scraggly grass on the other side of the shoulder. He glanced back and saw Christian, puffing with exertion, some thirty yards away.
There was no reason to wait. Half-crouching, half-trotting, Zeus went to the last truck in the line. He climbed up on the running board, and put his hand to the door. It was locked. And not only that: the driver was dozing behind the wheel.
Zeus dropped quickly to the ground, bumping into Christian and knocking him to the pavement.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Sssshhh.”
Zeus checked each of the trucks. The drivers were sleeping in all of them. Dejected, Zeus trotted went back to his bike.
“My leg is killing me,” said Christian, trailing him. “I think my ankle’s going to fall off.”
“You’ll live.”
“No, look at it.” He held his right leg up. Even in the dim light Zeus could tell the ankle was swollen. “I don’t know how much farther I can go.”
“Damn.”
“I know. It sucks.”
More than you’ll admit, Zeus thought, considering this mess is all your fault. But he kept his mouth shut; the last thing they needed now was another outburst of insanity.
“We’ll hitch a ride on one of the trucks,” said Zeus.
“What about carjacking one?”
Zeus considered the possibility.
“I don’t know,” said Zeus. “If we keep the driver with us, he’ll be a problem. If we kick him out, he’ll be sure to call the police.”
“Just shoot him.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Fuck him. This is a war.”
“We’re not at war, Win.”
“Like hell we’re not! We just blew up some of their landing ships. And a patrol boat.”
“He’s a civilian.”
“Crap. What do you want to do? We can’t just walk to Beijing. Why don’t we just turn ourselves in and let them shoot us as spies?”
“You’re the one that screwed this all up,” answered Zeus. He began to seethe. “You snapped. You’re an asshole.”
“Don’t call me an asshole.”
“You are. You’ve always been an asshole. At school. At the com — ”
Zeus stopped midsentence, ducking back as Christian threw a haymaker in his direction. Failing to connect, Christian crumbled as his ankle gave way under the weight of his swing.
“Asshole,” said Zeus. “Proves my point.”
; Christian began pounding the ground. Zeus, disgusted, shook his head. Then he realized his companion was crying.
“I am an asshole,” Christian sobbed. “I screwed everything up. I’m a wimp. I’m no good. I’m useless.”
All true, thought Zeus. But this was one hell of a time for such a revelation.
He squeezed his fingers against the corner of his temple. They were coming apart — Christian obviously, but he was, too. He already had. The fatigue of the last few days, the stress of the mission, and then the danger behind the lines: they’d reached their breaking point.
God, was it this easy to crack?
Zeus had heard dozens of lectures about battle stress and fatigue and posttraumatic stress, but in every story, the flash point had come after real duress: guys being shelled for hours on end, or marching through jungles for days, getting bombed by their own planes.
What the hell had he been through? One mission.
Actually, several. And getting to Hainan Island had been an ordeal in and of itself. But still, it shouldn’t have been enough to break him.
It wasn’t. He was a goddamn, well-trained soldier, for Christ’s sake — a freakin’ major.; a MAY-JOR, not some skinny pimple-faced skateboarder tossed into his first firefight without a weapon or a radio.
Goddamn.
“Pull yourself together,” he said, addressing himself as much as Christian. “We gotta get our butts out of here.”
Christian didn’t answer. But his back stopped heaving, and he slowly rose from the ground.
“We’ll hide in one of the trucks, and go as far as he takes us,” Zeus said. “Come on.”
He walked back to the line of trucks. He decided it would be better to hide in one of the smaller vehicles, since they wouldn’t have to worry about opening the rear door. But the cargo area of the first truck was jammed tight with canisters that appeared from the colors to be acetylene and oxygen, and there was no room except on the top of them. The second was only half full: some furniture and boxes were secured in the front, leaving a good space on the bed. The truck was a flatbed with sides made of wooden staves, covered by a canvas tarp. Lying on his belly, Zeus could see off the sides as well as the rear, while from the distance he figured he would look like one of the furled rugs poking between the cab and the boxes.