Shock of War

by Larry Bond

  Tien Yen was located beyond an estuary off the South China Sea. There was another large peninsula to the south. Rice fields, probably completely flooded, lay on the south side of the peninsula, which was heavily treed and marshy. Zeus thought they could sail up the far side of the southern peninsula, land near one of the roads to the south, then march inland about a mile and a half to the area of Ha Dong. A regiment of Chinese infantry had stopped here before the rain; their vehicles were the primary target.

  “There is another depot here, farther down,” said Zeus, tracing the route on the map. This was held by a platoon’s worth of infantry and their vehicles. “Ideally, we can hit them at the same time. If we move out now, we can get them and withdraw before dawn.”

  By the time Major Chaū finished translating, Captain Kim had a worried look on his face. Zeus knew there was a problem.

  “You better have him tell me what the problem is,” said Zeus.

  With some reluctance, Kim explained that the Vietnamese had been able to muster only two patrol boats for the operation. They weren’t nearly big enough to carry all of the missiles and the men in one trip.

  “How many can they carry?” Zeus asked.

  Kim wasn’t sure. The weapon crates were bigger than they had thought.

  “All right,” said Zeus. “We’ll figure it out when we see the boats. Let’s load up the trucks.”

  * * *

  The two boats the Vietnamese had mustered couldn’t have been more different. The first was a Stolkraft with a trimaran hull, an extremely fast, wide-bodied craft designed as a customs patrol boat. In smooth waters, it was capable of hitting close to 90 knots. With the remnant of the typhoon still beating the waves, the vessel would move considerably slower, but the design made it reasonably stable despite the heavy seas.

  The other boat was an ancient U.S. Navy PBR, a Vietnam War–era riverine patrol boat that had somehow made its way up from the delta. It was a tiny vessel, originally designed to handle only four crewmen, and never meant for rough water.

  The Stolkraft could have taken all of the men, but not the missiles. Even with some of the men sitting in the life raft on the aft deck, they could only bring five three-man teams with all of their gear. The PBR could take one squad, with all of their missiles loaded aboard the Stolkraft.

  “It’ll have to do,” said Zeus. “We’ll take one group up first. They’ll hit the northern depot. The Stolkraft will go back and load up. I’ll meet the second group farther south. We’ll strike the second point.”

  “You’re going with them?” asked Major Chaū.

  “Yes. I have to show them how to shoot.”

  “The procedure seemed easy.”

  “I’m going with them. Ask Captain Kim if I can get a rifle. All I have is my Beretta.”

  “Captain—”

  “I’m probably a better shot than most of these guys,” Zeus told Major Chaū. “It makes sense that I have a gun.”

  “I don’t believe General Trung envisioned your joining the troops,” said Chaū.

  Zeus just shrugged.

  * * *

  They set out just as the rain started whipping up again, a last arm of the storm punching them. Zeus stood on the bridge with Major Chaū and the boat’s captain, gripping a handhold for dear life.

  It was anything but smooth, but it beat what was happening on the other boat, which bounded up and down like a ball bouncing across the floor.

  As long as he remained focused on the mission, Zeus was all right—not only did concentrating on what they were going to do help stave off seasickness, but it kept him from thinking about Anna.

  “Another two kilometers to the inlet,” said Major Chaū. “Almost there.”

  “Good.”

  “You should go back with the boat,” suggested Chaū. “Your own general would surely prefer it.”

  Undoubtedly. Perry would surely have a fit when he found out, but Zeus had decided he was going anyway. He couldn’t have said exactly why. Some of it may have been the speech the captain had made, some of it his promise to General Tri. Some of it was duty; despite General Perry’s comments, he felt his orders to help the Vietnamese meant that he had to actually help them, not leave them in the lurch.

  And some portion, too, had to do with Anna. If he helped the Vietnamese now, maybe they would release her to him.

  A war prize.

  The waves calmed considerably as soon as they turned into the narrow strait of water that would take them to their landing area. The captain cut the engines, waiting for the PBR to join them.

  Zeus took a long, slow breath and stared out at the blackness in front of the boat. The Chinese army was only a mile and a half away on their right.

  It was a foolish plan. He should never have proposed it.

  Too late now.

  The boat began easing forward. Zeus left the bridge, climbing down the short ladder and walking to the forward deck. A sailor manned the machine gun there; four of the soldiers were crouched nearby, hunched over their knees as they waited to land.

  “Looks good,” said Zeus, trying to sound optimistic.

  The sailor on the gun raised his hand, catching the spirit if not the precise meaning of what Zeus had said.

  The night smelled of metal and wetness, the air thick with the typhoon’s passing remnants. The boat’s captain had predicted a fog would rise from the land as the storm passed. That would help them, Zeus thought, at least until it came time to fire the missiles. The laser needed a clear line of sight to the target, and too much moisture would interfere with the beam.

  So they’d wait for dawn then. No turning back now.

  The Stolkraft jerked against something. There was a muffled shout from the cabin, a command from the bridge. They moved backward, the craft stuttering in the water. Though shallow-drafted, the vessel had run aground.

  They maneuvered a little back and forth. Two sailors stripped to their underwear, and jumped into the water ahead of the bow. One disappeared completely. The other stood in water to his waist.

  The sailors guided them farther up the strait toward the land, until finally the boat’s captain decided they were as close as they were going to get. They brought the other boat alongside, then began to unload.

  Zeus was the third man off. He slipped into the water as quietly as possible. It was a foot and a half deep.

  Before the storm, this had been a rice field. The berms that separated the fields were covered, leaving only those with trees visible.

  It took nearly five minutes before the scout at the head of the group found a hump of dry land and a path to two small hovels beyond the field. The men quieted as they neared the buildings, unsure whether they were occupied or not.

  Taking no chances, Captain Kim detailed two of his teams to check the first building. It was empty, as was the second. He left a trio of men there to guide the others still coming up from the boats, then continued with the rest to a narrow gravel road a short distance from the houses.

  Zeus didn’t have a GPS unit, and had to get his bearings with a Vietnamese map and some Global Hawk images he had brought with him from the planning session. He turned his map sideways, retracing the path they had taken on the water, then moving his finger up through the land toward the hamlet the Chinese had seized as a command post before the storm. He double-checked it against the photos, making sure he was right.

  If they went due north, then cut west, they should see Chinese troops. There were two companies waiting out the storm inside the trucks along the road. Another was back in the hamlet.

  “We have to get through that lane over there,” Zeus told Captain Kim when he’d collected all his men. “There are some buildings where it meets the local highway. That should give us a vantage point to see up the road. The Chinese stopped about three miles farther north before the rain hit. We should be able to take the road.”

  He waited for Major Chaū to translate. The captain nodded vigorously.

  Ten minutes later, Zeus an
d the two Vietnamese privates who were acting as point men drew close to the back of the buildings at the southeastern quadrant of the intersection. There were three structures, all squat and dark. The tallest was a service station.

  Zeus used two garbage cans as a makeshift ladder, scrambling up the garage roof. It was made of metal, and between the pitch and slippery rain, Zeus had to climb on all fours.

  Just as he reached the apex, his AK-47 slipped off his shoulder and clanked against the metal roof. He cursed himself, pulling the gun strap back in place.

  When he put his head up, he saw dozens of Chinese armored vehicles scattered along the road around the intersection. A pair of Z99 tanks sat in the middle of the crossroads.

  The Chinese had moved south during the storm.

  13

  Forthright, Ohio

  “Pretty damn warm day,” said Tex, putting down the ax to take off his jacket. “Must be all this global warming you’re studying, right?”

  “Believe it or not, no,” said Josh. “I mean, it could be, but a warm day like this in February? That sort of thing has been happening forever. Climate change is more subtle.”

  “Droughts are subtle?”

  “I mean, the effects of climate change are very complex.” Josh picked up his sledgehammer and positioned the splitting wedge over a log. It had been Tex’s idea to cut the family some firewood. Josh had readily agreed, not so much because it was an easy way to thank them for putting him up, but because the exercise would make him forget about Mara.

  If he could forget.

  He swung the hammer down, getting the wedge in place for the real blow.

  “So droughts—they’re the result of climate change?” said Tex, picking up the ax again.

  “Yeah. Well, in aggregate.”

  “Jesus, Doc. I hate to say this, but you sound like a politician. Mincing your words. You never say what you mean.”

  Josh sighed. Actually, he could be extremely precise, talking about numbers and percentages and statistics.

  “It’s the trend that’s important,” he told Tex. “Climate change means more droughts. More warm winters like this. Which, for some places is good.”

  “I like it,” said Tex. “Don’t need a coat.”

  Josh swung the sledge. The log split cleanly in half.

  God, he missed Mara. He’d tried calling twice, but his calls went straight to voice mail.

  He hadn’t bothered to leave a message. Too much to say.

  He bent and took another piece of wood from the pile.

  14

  South of Halong Bay

  Zeus pushed his eye against the aiming sight, whispering just loudly enough for Major Chaū to hear. The tank was zeroed in.

  The two team leaders peering over his shoulder mumbled something as Chaū translated the aiming procedure. Zeus leaned back, letting them take a look.

  The clouds were moving away. Though it was still a good hour before the sun would rise, the sky was already light gray with a false dawn. The dark smudges they’d seen when they landed were now reasonable facsimiles of trees and buildings.

  Zeus had set up two teams on a small rise on the west side of the road, with a clear line to both tanks. Two other crews were gathered around a launcher a short distance away, their weapon aimed at the second tank. Little more than a kilometer separated the launchers from their targets. Easy shots.

  “They are ready,” said Chaū.

  “All right. Wait until I say fire.”

  Zeus trotted over to the other teams. He’d already sighted their weapons.

  Just as Zeus reached them, there was a loud pop behind him. Zeus turned to see smoke billowing from the rear of the launcher he had just left.

  Shit!

  “Fire!” he yelled. “Fire! Fire!”

  The missile leapt from the launcher next to him. There was a hiss and a low thur-rump-the. The Russian antitank projectile flew across the field and road, streaking along the line set by the laser beam. Racing against the reddish light, it didn’t stop when it came to the steel hull of the Chinese tank. The missile didn’t realize it had found its target, much less know what its mission was. It kept flying, penetrating into the steel shield and body, exploding in madness and frustration as the red laser light disappeared.

  The men inside the tank never knew that they had been fired on. From their perspective, there was a brief, terrible premonition of death, then nothing.

  “Load the next one, the next one,” Zeus told the men. “Aim at the APCs. As we planned. As we planned.”

  “Yes, Major,” said the team leader. He spoke a little English. The others were already loading a second missile.

  Zeus ran to Chaū. “Why the hell did you fire?” he yelled.

  “The top of the tank opened. We were afraid we had been seen.”

  The other missiles were launching, whizzing across the field. Zeus ran to the squat flat-roof building next to the service station, where he had set up two more teams. As he started to climb, he heard one of the missiles being launched. He got to the top and saw steam furling from the nearest APC.

  More missiles fired. Figures began stumbling from the houses up the street. The Vietnamese began firing their AK-47s, gunning them down.

  It was working.

  “Major! Major!”

  Zeus went to the back of the building, where Chaū was calling up to him.

  “We have to get back to the boat,” said Chaū. “We have to get back for the second attack.”

  “You’re right,” said Zeus. He leapt off the back of the building, rolling to his feet after he hit the ground.

  * * *

  “Everything is running late,” said Chaū, glancing at his watch as the PBR skittered southward, away from the peninsula where they’d landed and launched the attack.

  “Yeah,” said Zeus, steadying himself against a spar at the side of the boat.

  Chaū’s point was that the second attack would be made during the day, greatly increasing the danger. But there was no sense waiting now. The other units would be on alert because of this attack.

  As soon as they fired all of their missiles, Captain Kim and the teams would work their way south toward the second attack point; with luck they would meet up by nightfall to be evacuated.

  The Stolkraft met the PBR about two miles north of Hai Phong, the rest of the teams crowded so tightly on the deck of the boat they looked like refugees escaping the war. The PBR took on three men, a full team, then turned and followed the Stolkraft north to the second landing point, a marshy area inland from Dong Dui.

  The two boats treaded through a run of islands and jutting fingers of land, heading for a narrow estuary stream that extended nearly sixteen miles from the ocean. They were near Halong Bay, an upended jaw of earth, where some two thousand limestone and dolomite teeth poked through the water, flashing at the dragons said to haunt the area.

  A bridge ran over a creek about three miles inland. About a mile north of the bridge was a hamlet where two companies of Chinese APCs had parked before the storm. The units were the farthest south of the Chinese infantry.

  Fog drifted in from the ocean, the mist curling around islets of pillar-shaped rocks and tree-covered spits of land. The sun played through the mist, cutting it like a sword, flashing against the white rock sides to reveal intricate clefs and scars. The storm had pulled many trees down, and the two boats had to trim their engines to tread through the debris. The ends of tree trunks poked up like the elbows of dead sailors, and the dark hulks of the submerged branches loomed just below the surface, shifting like mythical beasts waiting to spring from the water and swallow the small PBR whole.

  Zeus rubbed his arms, suddenly cold. The rounded crags towering over him made him feel puny and small, showing him just how insignificant he was, how tiny, how unimportant.

  Kerfer’s words came back to him:

  It’s not your war.

  Standing on the forward deck, he realized nothing was his, not these looming green an
d white shadows around him, or the still-angry water. And especially not the hulking green earth behind them.

  By that logic, too, not one thing he possessed was his—not the gun loaned to him, not his boots, not his own arms or legs. The earth was the possessor of all things, not him; he was just another speck flicking across the sun, throwing a momentary shadow across the water.

  And as he contemplated that puniness he thought of Anna, thought of the soft way she had fallen into him, thought of her kiss and the touch of her lips. It was an antidote to his depression—the sunlight that pushed away the fog.

  This wasn’t his war, but it had brought her to him, and for that reason alone—for that reason beyond fate or chance, beyond even his duty—he would fight this war. He would find her and free her. Because they couldn’t deny him anything. He was their hero.

  The debris thickened as they began inland. Two soldiers were detailed to push some of the logs away. They began cheerfully enough, one of the men even laughing at some joke. But within moments one had slipped and fallen into the water, and by the time he was pulled out he was covered with bruises, and his arm seemed to have been badly sprained. There was no more laughter after that.

  Finally, they reached the mouth of the stream that would take them up toward the bridge. They passed into what looked like a clear lake: the typhoon had swelled the stream far beyond its banks, and rather than the farm fields Zeus expected they passed telephone lines and the tops of trees. The shoreline had completely disappeared. Even the boat captain was amazed at how high the water level had risen.

  “The water is much higher than normal,” Chaū explained, translating what the boat captain told him. “Higher even than during some rainy seasons. He expects that the area you wished to land will be flooded. It may be flooded all the way to the bridge, if the water is this high here.”

  Ordinarily, that might not have been a problem, but their experience farther north made Zeus worry that the Chinese might have moved down to the bridge. He took out his map and conferred with the boat captain, trying to decide on an alternate spot.

  “The captain says there is a stream that runs beneath the highway a little farther north,” said Chaū. He pointed on the map. “There is high land on the west side. If we landed there, we would be only about two miles south of the hamlet.”