by Larry Bond
And despite everything, they remained petrified of the Americans. The Americans, who were hiding in the shadows.
Why be afraid of them? China had succeeded in blocking any vote in the UN. Cho Lai was confident that there would be no vote of condemnation from the American Congress, either. He had spent enough money on lobbyists there to feed Harbin Province for a month—if only there were food to buy.
Still, one American remained beyond his reach: the President. He was a clever enemy, the dragon of many forms.
Why should Greene of all people help the Vietnamese? It was absurd and unfair. They had been Greene’s tormentors.
Admittedly, this had been an error of Cho Lai. He had thought the President would secretly endorse the punishment of Vietnam. He had even fantasized about calling him and sharing a few boasts. In his imagination, his foolish imagination, Cho Lai had thought Greene would welcome the country’s humiliation.
The intercom buzzed. Lo Gong, the defense minister, was waiting outside.
Cho Lai ordered him in.
“We are proceeding with a new plan to take Hai Phong,” Lo Gong said. “We will move down the coast with our tanks. And then, a stealth attack—we have ships that are prepared to enter the port.”
“Excellent,” said Cho Lai.
“The storm is the only difficulty.”
“What storm?”
“The typhoon, Your Excellency.”
“Damn the weather! Move ahead. Always timid! Is every general in my army a coward?”
The minister’s face reddened.
“Out!” thundered Cho Lai. “Out, before I lose my patience.”
The defense minister left without saying another word.
14
Outside Fangchenggang, China
There was still another hour before dawn, but the city was already stirring, with a stream of trucks headed both toward and away from the harbor area. Traffic had already congealed on the major roads. Even the small byroads Zeus threaded through had a fair amount of vehicles.
Clusters of PLA trucks and soldiers were parked along the sides of several roads. Their mission, if any, seemed to be one of reassurance rather than actual security. In any event, they weren’t stopping civilian vehicles.
“There’s a line ahead,” said Christian. “More traffic.”
“Any way around it?”
“Not that I can see. Nothing on the map, either.”
Zeus drew to a stop behind a late model Buick. The GM car was a status symbol here, a sign of wealth and probably political influence, which went hand in hand.
“There are some lights about a half mile ahead,” said Christian, leaning out of the cab to look. “Must be a checkpoint.”
“You see a place I can turn around?”
“Nothing.”
Pulling a U-turn at this point would undoubtedly draw a lot of attention. He could do it anyway, find a side street, turn off.
“Look for a store with a parking lot,” he told Christian. “We’ll pull in there and leave the truck.”
“Yeah.”
A better solution presented itself as he crept ahead: a gas station sat ahead on the left. He’d have to cross traffic to get there. But it would be perfect.
Zeus waited for the Buick to move up a little farther, then began angling the truck in the direction of the service station. There was a stream of cars coming from the other direction, spaced just far enough apart to make it dangerous to cross.
Finally, he saw his chance. The truck bucked, nearly stalling as he gave it too much gas. This time he was able to back his foot off the pedal in time to keep the engine working, and they made it across into the service station without stalling or getting hit.
As they pulled alongside a pump an attendant came out of the nearby building.
“We’re outta here now,” Zeus told Christian, turning off the engine.
The attendant looked at him quizzically as Zeus jumped from the truck.
“Fill ’er up,” said Zeus.
He tossed the man the keys, hitting him in the chest. With a quick stride, he walked around the back of the truck. Christian was already out.
“The ocean’s in that direction,” he told Zeus.
“Let’s go.”
* * *
It took them nearly two hours to get close to the water, walking down narrow streets that curled through mini-hamlets before opening into wet fields of salt marsh and muck. The area was crisscrossed by canals and bridges. Not many years before, rice fields had dotted the land, which had been partially reclaimed from the ocean centuries ago. But effluence from the nearby city and factories had poisoned the shallow bay waters. The ocean was rising gently, flooding into the muck, but it couldn’t come fast enough to cleanse the ground.
Adding insult to injury, much of the land was now being filled in, legally and illegally, with garbage from the industrial north. Zeus and Christian wended their way past several massive dumping grounds. One was a mountain of old computers and other electronic gear. A trio of squatters huts sat at the edge of the dump near the road, as if standing guard. An old woman and two children watched them as they walked past, no doubt wondering what they were up to.
The sea smelled worse with every step closer. A thick, oily stench hung in the air, stinging their eyes.
“End of the road,” said Christian, pointing toward the rocks ahead. “God, the smell is wretched.”
Zeus remained silent as he walked toward the water. He was calmer than he had been before, but even more tired. His stomach felt like a marble rock, smooth and hard. His mouth was dry, his neck ached.
The sun, low on the horizon, pinched his eyes when he looked back at it. They’d come out on the western side of a peninsula opposite the city proper, which lay two or three miles across a shallow bay. Zeus stood at the water’s edge, gazing across at the buildings in the distance. A jungle of red seaweed and algae floated nearby, giving the water a purplish cast. Barges were lined up to the right, a vast array bereft of cargo.
A navy vessel was anchored in the open water to his left, too far to be identified even if Zeus had been an expert on the Chinese navy. From here it looked rather large and ominous.
“Now what do we do?” asked Christian.
“We find a boat,” said Zeus. “There should be plenty of fishing boats around somewhere.”
“Let’s try this way,” he said, starting back. “We’ll work our way along the coast and see if we see anything.”
“I really need to rest.”
“Soon.”
* * *
About a half hour later, after zigging and zagging across a few marshy dunes and hills of grass that came nearly to their chests, Zeus spotted a pair of boats anchored together about twenty yards from land. They rocked gently with the light breeze.
There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Zeus sat down in muddy sand, and took off his shoes.
“We’re swimming?” Christian asked.
“Unless you got a better idea.”
The oily film on the water made Zeus decide he’d keep his pants and shirt on. He put his shoes on a rock, thinking he’d come back for them, then he put the gun there, too.
The mud and weeds were soft, like a carpet thrown beneath the water. The first few yards were almost flat; the angle was very gradual after that.
Zeus got within arm’s length of the nearest boat when the depth suddenly dropped off. He reached out with his arm and grabbed the side of the boat, kicking his feet free of the muck.
Long and narrow, the wooden-hulled craft looked more like a racing shell than a fisherman’s boat. It was propelled by two long oars, one at the bow and one at the stern. A tiny, open-sided canvas tent sat just aft of the midway point, its stretched fabric bleached and brittle from the sun.
“Front or back?” said Christian, working through the water behind him.
“You take the bow.”
Zeus pulled the long oar from the bottom of the boat and positioned it in the yoke.
The boat was tied to a stick that poked out of the water on the starboard side. Christian unleashed it, then moved up to the bow.
“We’ll go back for our shoes,” Zeus told him. “We may need them.”
In water this shallow, the oars were better used as poles, and they were much easier to manipulate standing up. But it took Zeus several minutes to realize that, and several more to master the technique well enough to get them close to the shore. Finally Christian jumped off, waded through the muck, and came back with the shoes and gun.
“Who do you think owns the boat?” he asked as he plunked Zeus’s shoes down.
“Somebody.”
“Maybe we should leave some money in the other boat.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, but Zeus ended up vetoing it. They might still need Chinese money they had—eighteen yuan from the trucker’s envelope. And leaving the American money might give anyone looking for them too much of a clue.
They headed toward the city’s shore, trying to skirt the Chinese warship by the widest margin possible. The wind began picking up when they were roughly halfway across; Zeus found it harder and harder to steer them in a straight line. By the time they got across they had been pushed back almost to the barges.
“We’re beat,” said Christian. “We really need sleep.”
“We gotta keep going,” insisted Zeus.
He tugged harder on the oar, angry with Christian even though he was only stating the obvious. They started doing better, then caught a break as the wind died.
“Look for a motorboat,” Zeus told Christian. “We’ll trade.”
“Yeah, anybody would take that deal.”
Zeus laughed. It was the first time he’d laughed in quite a while. It surprised him.
It felt good, shaking his lungs and clearing his head. They made it past the city peninsula, then began crossing a wide expanse of water toward an area of beaches. In happier times—only two years earlier—the beaches were popular with regional tourists. Now they were abandoned, flooded about halfway up, and cluttered with debris and seaweed.
No motorboats.
They kept going. The sun was high enough now to hit Zeus in the corner of his eye, the sharp edge of a nail in the flesh between socket and lid. He squinted against it, angling his head away as much as he could while still keeping his gaze on the direction he wanted to go.
Except for the glare, the sun was welcome. It felt warm rather than hot. The day turned pleasant, with just enough breeze to scatter the flies and mosquitoes.
An idyllic day, except for where they were.
Zeus saw that Christian wasn’t paddling anymore.
“Christian?” said Zeus. “Christian?”
He slid his oar against the side of the boat. He should go check on his companion.
Later …
* * *
With both men asleep, the boat drifted toward shore. Pushed by the current, it ran aground in a twisted maze of debris and muck on one of the small islands southeast of port. Zeus slept on, oblivious to everything around him—the seabirds, the stench, the two large but half-empty grain carriers passing up the channel a few miles away. The water lapping against the side of the boat entered his dreams as a gentle sound, its monotonous beat reassuring and adding to his ease.
But eventually his dreams took strange shapes, past mixing with present. He was back in the plane when the attack on the dam began. The flight morphed into part of the war simulation as they looked at the shape war in Asia would take. He was driving the truck. He was shooting the guard in the airport.
He hadn’t shot the guard in real life. But he was powerless to prevent it from happening in the dream.
In the dream, he shot the man who came for them in the hallway, then stood over him, pistol pointing at his forehead, daring him to move, even though the man was already dead. Blood began to spurt from the dead man’s right eye, then his left. It started to pour from his nose and his mouth and his ears.
The hallway filled with blood. It flooded, rising to his knees, his stomach, his elbow. Zeus’s hand was wet with it.
Then finally he woke up.
* * *
He was hanging half out of the boat, his arm deep in the murky water. He pushed himself upright, nearly losing his balance and flipping the craft over.
Or so it seemed.
Christian was huddled in the front. A rasping noise came from his chest. He was snoring.
Zeus stretched his back muscles, turning left and right slowly, his joints cracking. Perhaps they’d be better off staying here until nightfall. They’d have more strength.
On the other hand, a moving fishing boat was a lot less conspicuous than one hung up in the weeds.
By his reckoning, the border with Vietnam was no more than forty miles away.
Zeus crawled forward in the boat to wake Christian. But when he reached him he decided to let him rest. Better that one of them would have full strength, or as much as a few fitful hours of sleep would get him.
He went back and took the oar, pushing the boat backward out of the weeds. For a moment, he lost his balance and the boat tipped hard to the side. Zeus just barely managed to stay upright. He knelt for a moment, hunkered over to catch his breath. Then he rose and began to make his way.
The current flowed gently southward, which made it much easier to paddle. Zeus concentrated on making perfect strokes—long, powerful, with a subtle movement at the very end to correct his course. Inevitably, he tired of this, finding perfection unachievable. He began to concentrate instead on everything around him: the open water to his left; the succession of ragged, battered beaches and flooded swamps on his right.
Farther inland, up in the inlets and on the other side of man-made dykes, were pens for fish farms. Given the horrible smell and the waste that he saw along the shoreline, he wondered what sort of poisons the fish would contain.
* * *
The sun was nearing the horizon on his left when he spotted a Chinese naval vessel about a mile south. This one was much closer to shore than the one they’d skirted early in the day. It was smaller, with machine guns fore and aft.
It was infinitely more dangerous than the other one, Zeus realized; this was the sort of craft that would take an interest in him. Its guns could easily chew through the wood of his purloined boat.
Zeus decided he would slip toward shore and wait a few hours until sunset. It would be easier to get by then, and in any event, he could use a rest.
But as he edged the oar forward to act as a rudder, he saw the bow of the patrol boat tuck down, as if swallowed by a sudden wave. The flag on the mast shot to the left. The boat was turning. They’d already spotted them.
15
The White House
The past few presidents had gotten away from using the Oval Office as an actual working office, preferring the nearby study and even space upstairs in the residence, part of a trend toward demystifying and relaxing the presidency. But Greene liked the Oval Office for precisely the reason the others didn’t—he wanted the gravitas of the place to impress everyone on how important their work was.
And to emphasize the fact that he, George Chester Greene, was the president.
Not that it was working all that well this morning. Not that it ever worked all that well with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Matthews.
Matthews was enumerating, for perhaps the hundredth time since the crisis with China began, the dangers inherent in bringing a full carrier group into the Gulf of Tonkin.
The Army chief of staff, Renata Gold, shifted in her seat. The Army general—the first woman to hold the post—had been in favor of intervention early on, but lately had come under so much criticism that she seemed now cautiously opposed.
Caution being the watchword of the day.
“You’ve made your point about the aircraft carriers,” Walter Jackson, the National Security director, told Matthews. “But let’s cut to the quick: could they defeat the Chinese naval forces
?”
“Absolutely,” said the admiral.
Jackson glanced toward Greene. The NSC head had a triumphant smile on his face.
“Good,” said Greene, reaching for his coffee.
“But that’s not an argument to intervene,” added Matthews hastily.
“Noted,” said Greene. “Now, about General Harland Perry’s plan. Two divisions—”
“Impossible,” said Matthews sharply. “We can’t commit ground troops. Congress won’t back intervention.”
“If I might continue, Admiral,” said Greene. “Perry has suggested two American divisions could win back the gains the Chinese have made in the west. But he also notes that’s unrealistic, and I concur.”
That was a sop to Matthews. All Greene got from him was a tight frown.
“The goal, as I see it, should be simply to contain the Chinese,” said Greene. “We bring the A-10As there to stop the Chinese armor. That would be a first step. Then, establish a no-fly zone over the peninsula. F-22s and F-35s.”
Greene glanced at Tommy Stills, the Air Force chief of staff and the one solidly hawkish member of the joint chiefs. He was nodding vigorously.
“The thing I need to be assured of,” added Greene, “is that this works. Is it doable? Do we stop the Chinese?”
“There can be no assurances,” said Matthews. “You’re asking for the impossible.”
“I think it has a reasonable chance,” said Stills.
Greene turned to Gold. “General?”
“Better than fifty-fifty,” she said.
“We can’t commit forces without congressional approval,” insisted Matthews. “Not on this scale.”
“I’ll worry about Congress,” said Greene.
There was a tap on the door. One of Greene’s schedule keepers was prompting him for his next appointment: breakfast with a group of senators currently opposed to his measure to aid Vietnam.
“I know everyone is on a tight schedule,” said Greene, rising. “Thank you for your input. I’ll keep you updated.”
The chiefs and their aides filed out. Greene was feeling optimistic about the meeting; it had gone better than he had imagined.