“Yeah, Will is still gone, over there beside fucking China where the bastards are killing people. They’ll try to kill my Will, I know it damn well as I’m sitting here.”
Her mascara had melted and ran down each cheek in a long black line.
“Nancy, the men are all on the carrier,” Milly said. “Nobody is fighting with the U.S. We’re out of it. We’ll probably stay out of it. The TV says China and Pakistan will overwhelm the little country of Nepal in two or three days. Washington can’t even get an order through channels in three days. Our guys are going to be fine.”
“Oh, hell yes. Just like when they went into China and one of our guys got wounded. Ardith Manchester called me about an hour ago. She confirmed that our guys went in and brought out that senator who escaped from China a week ago. You bitches know that? No, I didn’t think so. One SEAL was wounded and fancy britches Ardith didn’t know which one it was. One of us could have a shot-up man right now and we don’t even fucking know it.”
“Ardith called today?” Maria asked.
“Just the fuck said so,” Nancy snarled. Then she lifted her eyes and brows and shook her head. “Oh, fuck, I’m doing it again. I’m sorry, Maria. I didn’t mean to…. What the hell?”
She stared at Maria for a moment, then began to sag and tilt out of the chair. Milly caught her before she came unseated. Slowly Milly eased her back into the chair and stood beside her, pinning her there without seeming to.
Nancy looked at Milly a moment, then across the table at Maria who was not good at hiding her emotions. Concern flooded her face, generating a small frown.
“Dear, is there—” Maria cut it off as Nancy’s eyes closed and she sagged down until her face rested on the table. Milly eased her up until she was sitting almost straight again and her eyes came open.
“Oh, God, I need a nap.”
“First how about some of that cherry pie you were looking forward to,” Maria said. “Whipped cream or ice cream on top. Which one?”
Nancy shrugged, sagged toward the table again. Milly held her up. Maria set before her a small plate with a wedge of cherry pie with a lattice top crust and smothered with whipped cream.
For a moment Nancy smiled. She reached for a spoon, but before she could take a bite she threw up, the vomit that had been held in too long exploded across the table splattering the whole table and Maria as well. Nancy heaved again, then once more. Maria threw Milly a small towel and she wiped off Nancy’s mouth and face, then eased her back in the chair.
“Now you’ll feel better,” Milly said. “How about lying down for a while?”
Nancy nodded and tried to stand. She couldn’t.
It took both of them to walk her to the living room sofa and ease her down on the pillows. Maria brought a blanket and put it over Nancy and tucked it in.
Nancy blinked open her eyes and let tears wash out of them, then she whispered. “I’m so sorry, so sorry.”
“Hey, that’s what friends are for,” Milly said. “Now, you get some sleep and you’ll feel better. Somebody with the kids?”
But Nancy had turned off her lights and went to sleep in a half second.
Maria went to the phone and called the Dobler home. Helen, the fourteen-year-old answered.
“Hello, this is the Dobler residence.”
“Helen, are you all right?”
There was a pause. “Mrs. Fernandez? Oh good. Is mom there? I told her she shouldn’t drive. I said I could drive her over there. Did she make it?”
“She’s here, but she ill. Right now she’s resting on the couch.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Fernandez. I tried to stop her. She’s been sick all afternoon. Every since I came home from school she’s been up and down. Pills and booze and some coke from what I saw. I’m so sorry.”
“Helen, I’m concerned about you and Charlie. Do you want to come over here?”
“No,” a pause. “No, we’re fine here. Chas is playing with his computer. I have some homework.” She paused again. “And some cleaning up in the house to do. You heard anything about Dad?”
“No. We get an e-mail now and then but they don’t tell us much. The Platoon is still on the carrier Stennis from what we understand.”
“The war over there…”
“I don’t see how we can get involved, so don’t worry. Now, are you sure you don’t want me to come over there? Milly is here, you remember her. Could she come and stay until you guys go to bed?”
“Mrs. Fernandez, I’m fourteen. I don’t need a baby-sitter.” She stopped. “Oh, great, that sounded brattish and juvenile. I’m sorry. You’re being kind. No, thank you but Chas and I will be okay. Will Mom stay there tonight?”
“I’ll try to talk her into staying here. We have that spare room.” Neither of them talked for a minute. “Helen, if you want anything, need any help, you just call. Have you locked all the doors and windows? Do that right now. You’ll be fine. You’re so grown-up I can’t believe it sometimes.”
“Thanks, that was cool. We’ll call if we need anything. Right now I’m making some Easy Mac for dinner. Thanks so much.”
They said good-bye and Maria hung up. She checked on Nancy. She lay with her head thrown back, her mouth half open and a soft snoring sound came out. Maria tucked the quilt in again and went into the kitchen. It smelled of Lysol.
Milly looked up from where she washed the last of the vomit off the refrigerator and the side of the stove. The kitchen tablecloth lay on the floor with a mound of soiled kitchen towels on it. The room was cleaner than it had been two hours ago.
“Thanks, you didn’t need to.”
“Yeah. Now we need to make some plans. Nancy stays here tonight, and I go over to her place?”
“I just talked to Helen. She and Charles are in good shape. Helen doesn’t want a baby-sitter. She’ll manage. Nancy could sleep for six or eight hours. Let’s go check the e-mail.”
The computer growled at them, came on, and settled down. Maria had learned to use the computer in self-defense. Miguel was so good at it she had to get on board. She called up her AOL program, hit the sign-on key, and waited. They heard the small musical electronic tones and sounds from the hardware; then the screen came on with the e-mail window, and a voice said: “Welcome, you’ve got mail.”
There were two entries. The first one with the subject of “Uncle Henry’s ill.”
She looked at the second one. “Dull in China Sea.”
She clicked on the second message and it came on the screen.
Hey, Maria and Linda. Love you guys. All quiet here on the big tub. Just floating along. We’re on standby but don’t see how we can get involved. Nobody is talking much. At least they haven’t started to censor our e-mail. That will be when we know something is afoot.
Linda, you still want to take riding lessons? We’ll talk about it when I get back. Might be able to give you a few to see if you really do like horses. Hey, just heard that we have another five mile run up on the flight deck. Gets monotonous doing all those laps. Five times down the flight deck for a mile. So, take care, and I’ll write again as soon as I can. Love. Miguel.
As soon as she saw the message was from Miguel, Milly turned away and looked at a book on the shelf. When Maria had read both messages, she looked up.
“Milly, you want to check your e-mail. Easy, we just go back to the start and list you as a guest and…”
“No, we know that nothing is happening there right now. What was the date and time it was sent?”
Maria giggled. “Tomorrow about two in the afternoon.”
“Yeah, they are ahead of us time-wise,” Milly said. They went back to check on Nancy. She hadn’t moved and still snored softly.
Milly looked at her friend and worry clouded her face. “Maria, you worked in drug rehab. What can we do for Nancy?”
Maria waved her to the kitchen where she fixed them the tea they hadn’t had time to drink. She also saw that the pie had not been hit by the vomit and set out wedges of the pie with v
anilla ice cream on top.
“In rehab we made suggestions. We showed a path they could follow. It’s like with an alcoholic. First the person themself has to want to quit, to dry out, or nothing that we could do would make any difference. They know what they’re doing. Some of them really didn’t know how to wean themselves off the drugs. When they admitted that and asked for help, then we could do some good and get some of them straight again. It didn’t happen often. We had no clout, no court orders, and no big money charges so we could insist that people dried out. We were county and advisory only. A real mess and mostly a waste of money.”
“So what can we do for Nancy?”
“We hold her hand, we clean up after her. We let her know that we love her and want only the best for her. We make ourselves available twenty-four hours a day for her. We baby-sit her when we can.”
“What shouldn’t I do?”
“Both of us shouldn’t scold her or put her down. We can’t indicate that we’re ashamed of her. We don’t let her think that we disapprove of anything she does. We tolerate it, we turn a blind eye to her tantrums and her drunks and her drug bashes. We maintain and do everything for her that we can.”
Something thudded in the living room. Both women hurried in. Nancy had fallen off the couch. She sat there, leaning against the couch, hair a mess, no make up, her blouse spotted with the vomit and the contrasting pants dark stained at the crotch.
“What the hell? Where am I? Oh God, do I feel like shit. Where?” She looked around, then nodded. “Yeah, good old Maria. The drunk’s favorite savior. What the fuck did I do this time, good old Maria?”
“You were sick, Nancy. You had a little nap.”
“Now, I’m going home. Just get me to the car and I can drive. Nobody else to drive. Damned lousy husband is off playing war games again. Fuck him!”
She struggled to stand but couldn’t. Maria and Milly hurried to her and helped her to her feet.
“Home, I want the fuck to go home.”
Maria nodded. “Sure, Nancy, we’ll help you get home. Might be better if we drive you. I know, I know, it’s only a little over a mile and a half. But it’ll be better. No trouble. That’s what friends are for, Nancy. We’ll help you however you want us to.”
“Home,” Nancy said. There was a pleading in it they hadn’t heard before. Not a sober tone, but closer to it.
They helped Nancy down the steps and to her car in the parking lot. Maria pointed to the back seat of the three-year-old Chevy and they eased her in where she promptly slid down with her face on the seat cushion.
Maria pointed to Milly to follow them in her car. Nancy’s keys were still in the ignition.
9
Dhangadhi, Nepal
Lieutenant Farooq Yuahya Khan stood behind a wooden frame building in this Nepalese town of twenty thousand and looked down the street two hundred yards at the police station. It was the last hold out of any organized opposition. He and his platoon of sixty Pakistan paratroopers had dropped in on the town at dawn the preceding day. They knew exactly where the town’s small military garrison was.
They caught most of the men in their bunks, killed half of them, and took forty prisoners. In rapid order they had captured the telephone center, the city administration building, and the town’s only hospital/medical center.
He and his men had flown in Chinese transport planes from Pakistan near the border and refueled in China. Then they flew in here two days ago, jumped, and lost only one man with a broken leg on the drop. They quickly quashed most of the opposition.
Now he gave hand signals and thirty Chinese-made rifles opened up on the police station from two sides. There was little return fire. He signaled again and his two best grenade men sprinted from cover to cover, then with increased support fire, they plunged across the wide street and slammed against the side of the police station. A red star shell broke high over the station. It was the signal to throw in grenades. Each man threw six grenades through three different windows and probably into six rooms.
Firing from inside the police station trailed off and then stopped. At once Lieutenant Khan ordered two squads to rush the station with a frontal charge using full-assault fire.
A few return rounds came from the station but not many. The soldiers kicked in the front door and threw in grenades; when the shrapnel stopped whizzing past them, soldiers jolted through the door and into the front and rear of the building.
In five minutes it was all over. The Pakistan lieutenant had no long-range radio, but a sergeant came out the front door and gave the move up signal, and an all-clear sign.
Lieutenant Khan worked down the street to the police station and hurried inside. There were more than a dozen dead Nepal police. He had them hauled out and put on the sidewalk for relatives to claim. He found two working radios. One a shortwave set was tuned to an Indian station in New Delhi, which was only two hundred miles to the southwest.
The broadcast was in English, and Khan could understand most of it. He sat quickly in a chair and he knew his face must be pale as he heard the news for the first time.
There is no estimate of the dead and mortally wounded, and critically sick in the city of Biratnagar, Nepal. The only authority CCN could contact was a corporal in the city’s police who was twenty miles into the countryside at the time of the bombing. The nuclear bomb exploded over Biratnagar the day before yesterday at dawn. At the same time the Pakistani and Chinese troops launched their invasion of the tiny Himalayan nation of Nepal. The corporal said, on a personal ham radio he carried with him, that the city is in total ruin. Most of it simply disintegrated in the fire ball. The rest of the buildings were flattened by the tremendous explosive force of the bomb. It could have been a twenty-megaton bomb, or one of forty megatons.
The corporal said the total devastation reaches out more than fifteen miles each way from the city center. He said the winds swirled and changed with the explosion and may have carried deadly radiation into several more population centers in this essentially flat land in the southwestern section of the nation.
Lieutenant Khan turned off the radio. He would have it taken to his headquarters in the old army fort at the edge of town. The buildings had cooking facilities, quantities of food, and places for his men not on patrol to sleep. More men were promised, but none had parachuted in. He had no way to contact his superiors or those of the Chinese. He looked at his map again and frowned.
The town he now occupied was only fifty-five miles in a direct line from the nuclear-bombed city. He wondered which direction the winds blew. Was there a chance they would blow to the west and slightly north? If so, his town of Dhangadhi would be right in their path.
He had not questioned his orders to parachute into Nepal from the Chinese planes. He did not question the Pakistani Army leaders when the officers were told of the attack on Nepal. There was no reason given, no justification. He wondered about the alliance with China to go into Nepal. It was a small nation. Why did China need help to take it over? He knew that China had almost three million men under arms. They could take the small nation quickly by themselves. Why would they want an ally?
There were all sorts of rumors in the Pakistan Army, especially with the officers who knew more of the plans. The enlisted men were told nothing of the attack or the alliance. Some thought that China had its eyes on Afghanistan. The feeling was that while China had many resources, it was short on good oil reserves. Others said that Afghanistan was not a prize package for conquest. It had no oil reserves at all if that was China’s ploy. The nearest good oil nation was Iran, Pakistan’s neighbor to the south who had ninety million barrels of oil reserve, nearly four times the reserves that China itself had. Yes, Iran could be the eventual target. But why the thrust into Nepal? Was it only a ploy to show the world that China had the nuclear bomb and wasn’t afraid to use it? Sounded reasonable.
Lieutenant Khan sat wearily in a chair in the police station while his men organized the place and assigned men there. He thought of
his family back in Pakistan. His wife would be worried into a state. His two small sons would wonder where their papa was. He had been a reserve in the Army and working daily at his job as a lawyer. Then the orders came and his unit was mobilized and sent to two weeks of special training and three jumps, then they were loaded into the Chinese transport planes and here they were. His unit had been lucky not to be shot up. He had lost two dead and three wounded. Lucky indeed.
Lieutenant Khan tried the small radio he had, but he knew it would not reach beyond the mountains. His only hope was that it would link up with some Pakistani units nearby.
He drove in a commandeered Nepalese Jeep to the telephone center. There he found most of the phone lines in operation. He called Dipalal, a larger town than his to the north about thirty miles well into the foothills of the mighty Himalayan Mountains. The lines were working.
Soon he was talking with his friend Captain Multan who led the attack on the larger town.
“Yes, almost no opposition. I lost only two dead, three wounded.”
“Why are we here, Captain? You heard about the nuclear bomb attack on that Nepal town?”
“Yes. We didn’t need such an outrageous blow. The Nepalese Army is small and spread out over the entire country. My friend, I don’t know why we are here. Either one of us could have captured Nepal in a week. Now it could be three or four days.”
Lieutenant Kahn talked to his classmate from the Military Academy for ten minutes, then they said good-bye and hung up. Kahn was trying to figure out how he could find out about the prevailing winds coming from Biratnagar. Would they bring deadly radiation with them? Or would it blow the other way into the mountains?
He had just hung up the phone when one of the Nepalese men who had been instructing the soldiers how to run the switchboards pulled a pistol from a desk drawer and shouted at Lieutenant Kahn. He bellowed a dozen words, then began firing from six feet away. He fired four shots. The first hit the lieutenant in the chest, driving him backward. The second hit his neck, bringing a spurting gush of blood. The third and fourth missed but Kahn slumped to the floor, his life’s fluid spurting to the ceiling from a ruptured carotid artery in his neck. Each spurt came lower, from six feet down to five in the air, then four and at last a bubbling at his throat as the soldiers around him tried to stop the flow.
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