by Jeff Edwards
The CIC crew blinked and shielded their eyes against the sudden illumination. Throughout the compartment, “dead” and “injured” watchstanders climbed to their feet, dusted off their uniforms, and went about the business of restoring their equipment to operational status.
A young OS3 lifted a loop of heavy cord from around her neck and examined the yellow cardboard tag clipped to the end. Large block letters on the tag proclaimed: CIC CASUALTY #6 — ELECTRICAL BURNS / BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA / DEATH.
The Sailor handed the casualty tag to a man in orange coveralls, one of the members of the Coordinated Ship’s Training Team. “Here,” the OS said. “I don’t need this. I’m not dead anymore.”
The orange-suited observer tucked the tag into the crook of one arm, where he was cradling several similar tags. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” he said. “But if I were you, I’d stay dead until time for chow. Then you wouldn’t get stuck doing afternoon sweepers.”
The Third Class Operations Specialist grinned. “Oh yeah, like that would work. Being dead does not get you out of pushing a broom.” She shrugged. “At least they killed me early. I managed to catch a few Z’s down there on the deck while everybody else was busy trying to save the ship.”
About ten paces away, Captain Bowie met Commander Silva by the Tactical Action Officer’s chair. Bowie raised one eyebrow. “What do you think, Commander?”
Silva nodded. “Impressive, Captain. I’ve never seen anything like it. You’ve got one hell of a crew here.”
Bowie gave her a wistful little smile. “All modesty aside, they are pretty damned impressive. I’m proud to serve with every one of them. Every man and woman on this ship gives a hundred and twenty percent.”
He shook his head. “But they won’t be my crew for much longer, will they? They’ll be yours in just a couple of weeks, Commander.”
His eyes traveled around CIC, moving slowly, trying to soak up every detail as though he might never again see such a magnificent sight. And that would be true all too soon. The change of command was only sixteen days away. And then this would not be his ship anymore.
When the final salutes were exchanged, Captain Samuel Harland Bowie would be on his way to becoming Deputy Commander of Destroyer Squadron Fifteen. At that same instant, Commander Katherine Elizabeth Silva would become Captain Silva, the new commanding officer of USS Towers.
The most dramatic and important part of Bowie’s career would wind to a close. He already knew that nothing would ever fill the hole that was going to leave in his life. And through it all, he’d have to smile and make polite speeches, pretending that he was happy to surrender command of his ship to a near-total stranger.
Damn. Damn.
He exhaled slowly. If wishes were fishes…
He turned back to Commander Silva, the prospective commanding officer of USS Towers. “Let’s head up to the wardroom. We can grab a cup of coffee while we wait for the Training Team to finish prepping their debrief.”
Silva started to follow him toward the exit.
Bowie slowed his pace a fraction to allow her to walk alongside. “Your friends call you Kate?”
Commander Silva smiled. “Only my father can get away with that. Everyone else calls me Kat.”
“With a K?”
“That’s right. With a K.” She smiled again. “It’s a long story.”
Bowie opened the watertight door and motioned for her to step through. When they were on the other side, he dogged the door behind them and they resumed walking.
“How about you?” Silva asked. “Do your friends call you Sam?”
The captain shook his head. “Nope. They call me Jim.”
Silva halted in mid-stride. “They call you Jim Bowie? Really?”
Captain Bowie grinned. “Really.” He started walking toward the wardroom again. “That’s a long story too.”
CHAPTER 2
BARKHOR SQUARE
LHASA, TIBET
WEDNESDAY; 19 NOVEMBER
3:34 PM
TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’
The helicopter came in low and fast, clearing the ornate golden rooftops of the Jokhang temple by only four or five meters. Flying so close to the 1,300 year old building was a blatant violation of a dozen laws and security ordinances. Any other aircraft that dared such a maneuver would be forced to land, or shot down by ground troops or air forces. Today, the laws and regulations did not apply. Not to this helicopter.
It was an ordinary looking HC-120 Colibri, the plump dragonfly fuselage noticeably European in design, the paint scheme and markings just as clearly Chinese. But the local police and military commanders knew who was riding in the passenger seat, and no one would be foolish enough to interfere.
The pilot had been ordered to land as quickly as possible, by the absolute shortest flight path. He was following those orders to the letter. He steepened the angle of his approach, practically skimming the top of the tall stone stele at the front gate of the temple wall.
The stele was a rounded obelisk, nearly as ancient as the Jokhang temple itself. The stone had been erected in 822 AD by King Relpachen, to commemorate the Sino-Tibetan peace treaty, which had guaranteed that China and Tibet would forever respect one another’s borders. Eroded by centuries of wind, rain, and snow, the words carved in the porous gray stone were still legible. China’s public proclamation of Tibet’s national sovereignty remained easily visible, for all the world to read. The irony was apparently lost on the occupying Chinese forces. It was not so easily overlooked by the Tibetan locals.
A landing zone had been cleared in the center of Barkhor Square. The usual throng of visitors, pilgrims, and shopkeepers had been pushed back to the edges of the square. The onlookers were now held at a distance by a perimeter of wooden barricades, patrolled by several hundred hard-eyed Chinese soldiers.
Into this temporary enclave, the helicopter dropped the last few meters to the ground, the pilot battling an unexpected crosswind at the last second, before bringing his machine to a brisk landing on the flagstones.
The helicopter’s turbine had barely begun to slow when a dark green military vehicle pulled alongside and a young Army major leapt out, ducked under the spinning rotors, and trotted to the passenger door of the aircraft.
The vehicle was a Dongfeng EQ2050, a near carbon-copy of the American-built Humvee. Officially, it was an all-Chinese design, produced completely from parts manufactured in China. In reality, about half of the vehicle’s parts were imported from the American company AM General, in South Bend, Indiana—the manufacturer of the original Humvee. This detail was carefully ignored by anyone who did not want to arouse the ire of the Communist Party.
The door of the helicopter swung open, and the major snapped to attention.
The man who stepped out into the downwash of the rotors did not seem to be particularly formidable. He was in his mid sixties, lean, and fit, with crisp black hair and a creaseless face that seemed to subtract several years from his appearance. His dark suit and sharp white shirt were neatly tailored, but not of excessively fine quality. The one stroke of extravagance in his appearance was a red necktie of lush raw silk. He looked like a moderately-successful Chinese businessman in a fairly ordinary business suit.
The mechanical wind from the helicopter rotors whipped at his hair. He paid no attention, crossing the distance to the waiting military vehicle in several quick strides. He did not bow his head as he passed beneath the whirling blades of the helicopter rotors. He walked with his head held erect. Perhaps he carried some internal confidence that no machine of the Chinese military would dare to threaten the head that rode upon his shoulders. Or, perhaps his thoughts were so distant that he was unaware of the danger.
His name was Lu Shi, and he was the First Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China. Technically that made him the second most powerful man in the Chinese government, junior only to the Premier himself, Xiao Qishan. In reality, Lu’s role as Xiao’s subordinate was no more than a polite fict
ion.
Premier Xiao was not a young man, and his health had been declining steadily since his most recent heart attack. The old dragon had earned his position, and the honors that went along with it. Lu Shi was quite content to let Xiao wear the formal title for whatever weeks or months he had remaining to him, but no one in the senior ranks of the Communist Party had any serious doubts about who was running the country.
Even if there had been such doubts, Lu was Chairman of the Central Military Commission. That made him the effective commander-in-chief of the entire Chinese military. When the appearances were stripped away, Lu Shi was secondary to no one.
A half-pace behind Vice Premier Lu came a pair of solidly-built men in identical dark blue suits. Their faces were humorless, and their eyes scanned the crowd and the assembled military personnel with the same calculated degree of suspicion. Both men were Bao Biao, a Mandarin term most often translated as bodyguard, but more properly rendered as protector, or defender.
Lu Shi disappeared into the open rear door of the vehicle, followed immediately by his two guards, and then the military officer.
The crowd watched from the edges of the perimeter, many of them curious about the identity of the oddly imperious businessman who had dropped out of the sky into their midst. Who was this stranger, and how did he command such sway with the military and the police?
For most of the onlookers, those questions would never be answered. The soldiers shifted several of the wooden barricades, and guarded the procession of the car until it had left the square and disappeared into the streets of Lhasa.
The helicopter’s turbine began to pick up speed again. In two or three minutes, the aircraft was lifting away into the sky.
When it was gone, the soldiers began packing up the wooden barricades. In a few minutes more, the soldiers were gone, and people began flooding back into the square. Beyond the aroused curiosity of the crowd, there was no sign at all that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
* * *
Lu Shi stared vacantly out the side window as the streets of Lhasa scrolled past. Colors and shapes slid into his field of vision and then slid out again, without making any impression on his conscious mind. His eyes were unfocused, and so were his thoughts.
For a man whose intellect was practically the stuff of legend, such an utter lack of acuity was—quite literally—unheard of. For the first time in his life, Lu Shi could not make himself think. Moreover, he didn’t really want to think.
One of the heavy-grade military tires hit a pothole. The vehicle’s stiff suspension did little to cushion the impact, transmitting the shock directly into the passenger compartment, and sending a jolt up the spine of every passenger. The ride was not smooth; the seats were not at all like the well-padded luxury of the limousines that Lu Shi traditionally rode in. He didn’t notice.
His fingers absently fidgeted with his red silk necktie. It had been a gift many years before, from Lu Jianguo. Even the mental recognition of his son’s name brought a tremor to his hands.
Unwanted images came surging into his brain. Photographs of the burned and twisted wreckage of the train... Video footage of the wreck site… Smoke still rising from the smoldering remains of the passenger cars. Soldiers and emergency crews carrying stretchers loaded with the bodies of the wounded and the dead.
Lu Shi clenched his eyes shut, and tried to block out the visions of blood and mangled flesh.
None of the photographs or accident footage he had seen contained the face of Lu Jianguo. For that small blessing, he could be grateful. He had not been forced to look upon images of his son’s broken body. But Lu Jianguo had been there, among the dead and the dying, unrecognized by the first rescue teams to arrive. Known only to the medical personnel and the soldiers as another injured passenger: another victim of the carnage.
Somewhere in Lu Shi’s mind—below the threshold of conscious awareness—fear, and anger, and grief were circling like sharks. But for now, his emotions were as paralyzed as his higher thinking processes.
His fingers went through the motions of straightening his necktie, tightening the knot, smoothing the silk, loosening it a fraction, and then beginning the sequence again.
After some unmeasured interval, a hand touched his shoulder. “Comrade Vice Premier, we have arrived.”
Lu Shi looked up, willing his eyes to focus. The vehicle had stopped at the entrance to a whitewashed stone building with curved glass doors. He glanced at the raised metal sign long enough to confirm that this was indeed the Tibet People’s Hospital, and then allowed his eyes to drift away. His fingers found the red necktie again.
The rear door opened, and Lu Shi followed the Army major out of the vehicle, across a short stretch of sidewalk, and through the double glass doors into the lobby.
A clutch of white-jacketed hospital personnel inclined their heads respectfully, and then shuffled forward to greet him. Some of them were probably doctors, or perhaps the directors of the facility, but Lu Shi’s guards weren’t interested in credentials. They stepped forward to form a barrier between the Vice Premier and his would-be visitors.
Neither of the guards spoke a word, but their facial expressions and body language announced quite plainly that they would not hesitate to use lethal force on anyone foolish enough to approach the invisible perimeter around their protectee.
The Army major selected one of the white-jacketed men, apparently at random. “You!” He poked a finger in the man’s direction. “Take us to the room.”
The man nodded vigorously, and said something unintelligible.
Lu Shi, his guards, and the major followed the unnamed man down a hall and into an elevator. Three floors later, the man led them out of the elevator, past the circular desk of a nurse’s station, and to the door of a room.
The man opened the door, stepping out of the way so that Vice Premier Lu and his flankers could enter.
Lu Shi stood before the open doorway without moving. He had arrived at a threshold, both figuratively, and literally. This was the place. He had reached the moment that his subconscious had been struggling to postpone, or even to deny entirely.
His senses, which had been dulled into near lassitude, seemed to stir fitfully. The doorframe, the walls, and even the white-coated stranger gradually loomed into sharper focus. His hearing, which had filtered out the majority of the sounds in his environment, began to return. He slowly became aware of the murmur of distant voices, the low hum of electrical equipment, and—he did not want to hear this—the cyclical hiss of a mechanical respirator.
This last sound was both repelling, and hypnotic. The high-pitched shush of a forced inhalation, followed by the gurgling rasp of the suction cycle, and then the shush of another forced breath. There was something obscene about the idea of a machine pumping air into a man’s lungs, and then sucking it out again.
Lu Shi shuddered involuntarily, realizing as he did so that his sense of smell was recovering as well. Accompanying the surge of returning sights and sounds came a torrent of odors. The sharp alcohol reek of disinfectants. The coppery-tang of blood. The fetid scent of human misery.
The numbness was beginning to recede, but he was not ready to let go of it yet. He wasn’t ready to think, or to feel, and he was definitely not ready to walk through the door in front of him.
He became conscious of the fact that his fingers were toying with his necktie. He let his hand drop to his side.
No one spoke.
His guards stood at his elbows like a pair of temple dogs, ready to react instantly, or to wait for a thousand years—hovering one hair breadth away from lethal action.
The Army major waited as well. He was a different breed of warrior. His body and senses were not tuned for instantaneous combat. As a soldier, he was prepared to fight—even to die—if he ever came to a time and place that made such things necessary. But now was not that time, and this was not the place. For the moment, his job was to wait for his superior to make the next move, or to issue the next or
der.
The stranger in the white lab coat continued to stand without speaking. He did not have the extraordinary discipline of the guards, or even the situational discipline of the soldier. But he was not an idiot. He would stand, holding the door open, for as long as necessary. He would not speak; he would not move; and he most assuredly would not allow the door to close in the face of the First Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China.
The comforting envelope of disorientation was eroding rapidly now, replaced by a growing sense of fearful expectation.
Lu Shi’s rise to power had not been uncontested, and it had certainly not been gentle. He was no stranger to conflict or adversity. He was not easily frightened, but he was afraid of what he would find on the other side of that open doorway.
He forced down a fleeting urge to turn and walk away from this place. He exhaled slowly, steeling his nerve. Before he could change his mind, he moved forward, walking briskly through the open doorway.
The room had obviously been intended for at least three patients, but there was only one occupant now. The other beds had probably been bundled off to some storage closet, to make room for the son of Vice Premier Lu. The hospital staff was perceptive enough to understand that this was the most important patient their facility would ever care for.
The lone bed was positioned near the window, surrounded by IV racks, medical sensors, and several pieces of equipment that were less easily identified. The entire array was cross-connected by hoses, ribbon cables, and loops of clear plastic tubing.
On the bed, covered by a green hospital sheet, lay a vaguely human shape. Lu Shi averted his eyes from the shape as he crossed the room toward the bed. He was not ready to look. Not yet. He kept his attention on the baffling collection of medical devices. Nearly every piece of equipment seemed to have a wire or a tube that snaked across the floor to disappear under the green sheet. The patient—Lu Shi could not yet bring himself to think of this inert shape as his son—was wired up like a laboratory rat in some hideous medical experiment.