by Jeff Rovin
“SAN Outpost Marion Island,” a voice said in highly polished English. “This is Command Master Chief Petty Officer Kar-Yung Cheung of the corvette Shangaro. We note two explosions in your vicinity. One occurred this morning at 12:39 A.M. on Marion Island. We understand this to have been South African A330-200 Airbus flight 280. We note that assistance has not yet arrived. We stand ready to help.”
“Shangaro, Outpost Prince Edward has received your offer and will pass that offer along. Thank you.”
“The other explosion was at sea earlier this morning. Our helicopter photographed debris. Is the identity of this vessel known to you?”
“It is not, Shangaro. We recorded the incident at 2:59 A.M. and it was reported.”
“Very good, Outpost Prince Edward. We note as well that you have an ailing officer on Prince Edward Island. As we are at the coast, may we volunteer the services of our trained medical personnel?”
Sisula was silent. Van Tonder quickly considered the matter. Without knowing whether medical help was on the way, he had to decide whether Mabuza’s recovery was worth risking inviting the Chinese ashore. He believed that humanitarian rather than hostile intent would spare him from any disciplinary repercussions.
Not that it mattered. The lieutenant needed help. Military regulations allowed for SOS assistance by foreign forces—as long as national security was not compromised, or, as a poster on the mess hall at Simon cautioned: Emergency? Shun Over Sharing. There was also the Chinese crew to consider. They might recognize the risk.
“Shangaro, this is Commander Eugène van Tonder on Prince Edward,” he said. “I can see your corvette from the ledge above Ship Rock. I urge you not to approach. There is an unknown toxin abroad.”
“You are unaffected?”
“We are. When we approached the coast by helicopter, my pilot became ill. We immediately turned back to Point Dunkel but set down when the lieutenant became too ill to fly.”
“Then exposure was limited.”
“So it seems.”
“We understand the risk and have consolidated our crew in sealed areas,” said Cheung. “We wish to be of assistance.”
Van Tonder did not believe that. But if they could help Mabuza, he was not going to argue.
“Do you have hazardous materials gear and a means of quarantine?” van Tonder asked.
“Our medic informs me we do. What are your pilot’s symptoms?”
“Like the flu but much more debilitating. He’s perspiring, shivering, feverish.”
“Your proximity to him seems not to have affected your health. Have you touched him?”
“Not with bare skin,” van Tonder said. “I’m also wearing a surgical mask, as is the pilot.”
“We will send our medical officer by helicopter to your position,” the Chinese officer informed him.
“Sir, I would advise you not to bring the ship any closer.”
A new voice came on. “Commander, this is Chief Medical Officer Han. We do not detect radiation or gas. Toxins rise with the heat. We believe that, being below your point and with reasonable precautions, our shipboard crew will be safe.”
“Thank you for the caution, Commander van Tonder,” Cheung added.
“Thank you for your assistance,” the South African commander replied.
The formality of both men disguised mutual mistrust. The conversation was by the book, no doubt recorded. The Chinese knew about the Marion Island outpost, had flown over it many times. No secrets were betrayed.
The commander told Sisula to terminate the call then removed his headset. He turned to Mabuza.
“Help is on the way,” he said.
The pilot just shivered and nodded. For his part, the commander was getting cabin fever just sitting here.
How much worse can it be on the ledge than it is here, with an infected man? he wondered.
But he couldn’t leave Mabuza. Just wiping the man’s forehead let him know he was not alone.
Within minutes, a long, sleek patrol boat had left the starboard side of the corvette, headed toward Prince Edward Island. The sound of the engine, echoing through the cove below, made the boat sound close and immediate. As it reached a crescendo, van Tonder saw Mabuza’s hands come to life.
Choking up, the commander steadied them with his own.
“It’s okay, Lieutenant,” van Tonder said. “That’s not us. It’s the rescue ship, I think.”
Mabuza nodded weakly. “I—I am glad.”
“Me too.”
After a moment Mabuza relaxed.
Van Tonder looked out again and saw, in the distance, the corvette slicing through sparkling waters and coming closer to shore. Though the seas were dark, the lights were not. It stopped roughly a quarter mile out. The lights on its bridge tower flashing, the patrol boat continued toward the island, finally vanishing below the ledge. He knew from his many patrols that the seasonal land bridge, Ship Isthmus, would prevent them from circumnavigating Ship Rock. It appeared when ice piled high on submerged rocks, creating a tenuous link with the larger island.
He also knew that the patrol boat did not have to go around. What they wanted was on the eastern side.
Van Tonder slipped the headset back on.
“Michael?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Report to Simon that the Chinese have come to Ship Rock with what appears to be an armed military unit,” he said. “Tell them I think they mean to stay.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
USAFRICOM C-21, Atlantic Ocean
November 11, 5:00 P.M.
Traveling eastward, toward night, Williams was reminded of all the jet-lag journeys he had taken, often in big, rattling C-130s which seemed to exist in their own perpetual twilight.
The small, slick, ivory-white C-21 was not that. The passengers felt every bump and nudge of turbulence, though that did not stop Rivette from napping, Grace from reading Daoist texts or meditating, and Breen from reading about the South African health minister and everyone associated with her. One thing Williams had learned about the major was that, like any great attorney, he liked to be prepared.
Williams had been following Berry’s almost continuous stream of updates and forwarded intelligence reports. The latest was that a Chinese corvette had made itself at home off Prince Edward Island and a helicopter had landed. Then there was a photo with this caption from the National Reconnaissance Office:
The PLAN troops are armed and all in hazmat masks.
Berry called a few minutes later. “Beijing’s got balls, I’ll say that.”
“You have said it, many times.”
“Yeah, but dicking around with Taiwan and Japan or even India isn’t the same as planting a flag so far from their shores.”
“It’s not the same, but it was inevitable. Geographically, the islands in the South Indian Ocean are in the path of their westward expansion. Militarily, they want to control whatever is loose on that island.”
“That can’t be allowed, Chase.”
“No? Anyone who approaches, other than South Africa—who will be no match for them—risks a showdown. My white papers at Pacific Command, which no one read, suggested remedies for just this kind of creeping expansion.”
“What did you suggest doing about it?”
“Boosting our financial ties with the nations in that region before China could make them dependent, and quickly boosting their military capabilities.”
“An arms race and investment, multi-pronged escalation,” Berry said. “A recap of what we did with NATO and in Eastern Europe.”
“It broke the USSR,” Williams said. “Forty years later, Russia and the republics are still near bankruptcy.”
“True, though it’s too late for us there, now,” Berry pointed out.
Williams laughed. Once. “I know that tone. What’s your solution?”
“I have what may be a terrible notion, but let’s see how it plays out. What if you and the major were to go see this Barbara Niekerk while Rivette and Grace too
k a trip to Prince Edward?”
Williams’s mouth twisted. He had not seen that sneak attack. In his mind, Black Wasp and Yemen was an aberration. A terrorist on the run had to be stopped. Rules did not apply. Now, as then—and with a lifetime in the military clinging stubbornly—his mind was still in the old Op-Center way of doing things. That meant relying on the Joint Special Operations Command, a small cell of special operators who were combat ready at any moment. But there was a big difference. They were seconded to Op-Center by a secret memorandum of understanding between the White House, the Department of Defense, and Op-Center. They had a command structure and rules of engagement.
Black Wasp had no restraints.
“My initial reaction?” Williams said. “It’s an effective use of Black Wasp. But baked into that is the uncertainty factor of two young people who like to fight and overreach.”
“They wouldn’t be there otherwise,” Berry said. “They’d sure surprise the hell out of the Chinese.”
“Matt, I’d consider this very carefully,” Williams said, then was silent for a moment. “Dammit. You have, haven’t you? This isn’t a ‘notion.’”
“What the hell is Black Wasp about, if not this exact kind of scenario?”
“I’ll ask another way. Do you want them taking out Chinese troops?”
“Do you want Beijing to create a weaponized microbe that could be exponentially more lethal than the anthrax they currently have?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“To which the answer is ‘no’?”
“You are talking about a military with massive resources in the region, and the will to use them—”
“We don’t know that, Chase. No one’s seriously challenged them yet.”
“Then why not send in the Carl Vinson and move other naval assets into the region? Blockade the island, nothing in or out.”
“Because the president is concerned, as am I, that the Chinese may not need arms to punch their way out,” Berry said. “If one corvette can use a microbe to upend the U.S. Navy, the balance of power shifts globally, instantly.”
“Until we get the bug. Or a cure. Or both.”
“From the bodies of dead seamen on a ghost ship? No. That’s a new Vietnam, a Desert One, a defeat that lasts for generations.”
Williams had known it was a losing argument from the start. The way Berry had described things was the way they were going to be played. Rivette and Grace in guerrilla warfare against the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
Christ.
“What’s your endgame?” Williams asked. “You want this—what’s your best-case scenario.”
“I don’t know how we stop the Chinese from obtaining whatever is out there, but we need it too.”
“What, we swap electron microscope photos? Mutual assured destruction?”
“Something along those lines. We both develop warheads, we both develop cures, we wait for the arms race to go somewhere else.”
“And if Black Wasp is caught?”
“They’ll be in civvies,” Berry said. “They’ll have no ID and the Chinese have no imagination. Ideally, they’ll take one of them to be local, the other as somewhat local.”
“And not ideally?”
“It still works for us. The Chinese haven’t been shy about fly-by and sail-by near collisions with every military power in the region, including us. Imagine the game changer this could be. They have a hive mentality in the military. Wasp buzzing in their military ear? That will shake them up.”
“The legacy of the Midkiff administration,” Williams said. “A final attempt to rattle Beijing.”
“You think this is a Hail Mary? It’s not. It’s a tactic we’ve been considering for over a year, since we authorized Black Wasp. This is part of what commanders in chief are supposed to do. Stay ahead of an enemy. I didn’t think I had to explain that to you.”
“You don’t. But part of my job is not to send troops on suicide missions.”
“That’s what your job was,” Berry reminded him. “I never told you what the code name for this project was before we settled on ‘Black Wasp,’ did I?”
“You did not.”
“‘Loose Cannons,’” Berry said. “The president had grave reservations about this idea, as he should have. The Intrepid attack forced our hand. The election is forcing it again. How long will it take for President Wright to get up to speed? Six months? A year? In that time, China can control the Indian Ocean. To the north, Russia can reclaim more of its old empire. We need to show them what the United States is doing to define twenty-first-century counter-aggression. We’ve got Space Force above, Black Wasp below—maybe a whole nest of them before long—and the rest of our streamlined, armed-to-the-gills military in between.”
“Sounds good in the telling.”
“You know as well as I do that nothing is guaranteed,” Berry said. “Except doing nothing. That’s certain failure.”
Williams had no rebuttal. His concern was his team—now. Back when he was combatant commander for both Pacific Command and Central Command, he made these same pronouncements, tacitly okayed dangerous special ops missions. Some other officer, who knew the faces, had to worry about their safety.
“Work it out,” Williams said. “I’ll tell the team.”
“Thank you,” Berry replied.
“Sure,” Williams said. “All I have to do is figure out what advice to give them, not that they’ll take it.”
“How about ‘don’t screw up’? They will know exactly what that means.”
Berry was being glib but he was right. When Williams gathered the others around and laid out the situation, he expressed deep concern about the ambiguous mission plan.
Grace was untroubled. Apart from her martial arts skills, her deeply etched belief system showed why she had been selected for the Black Wasp experiment.
“The Chinese neigong philosophy of the Five Positions offers guidance,” she said. “In any situation there are only five things one can do. Progress, regress, stay, expect, and fix. If a fix is not clear, you do one of the others. If it is, you act.”
Major Breen was unconvinced. “What if your fix, in that moment, is clear—say, surviving by killing a Chinese naval officer—but it risks a larger conflagration?”
“That risk is already present,” she said.
“I saw this movie about General Patton, right?” Rivette said. “He wanted to fight Russia while he already had an army in Europe instead of having to go home and come back when the enemy was even stronger. Isn’t that what happened, in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine?”
Williams chuckled. Breen was not amused by that or by the unified militancy of the younger members.
“I guess it’s pointless to ask what happened to diplomacy,” the major said.
“Never stopped a gang war back in L.A., ever,” Rivette said. “I don’t know about all this Shaolin stuff, except what I saw in the movies, but I know that if you let a street fall, then a block fall, then a neighborhood fall—you got Detroit or Watts. No, Major. You stop a bully, you stop a war.”
Breen looked at the clean carpet with its gold and blue pattern. No grime anywhere around the bolts that held the seats to the floor. It was cleaned and maintained by the military. It was done right because there was order. Just like the laws he was sworn to preserve.
“No one can have certainty about anything,” Breen said. “Maybe that’s why I trust in regulations and guidelines. No knock intended, Lieutenant, but to me that means something a little less vague than ‘fix.’” He shrugged. “Maybe I just don’t understand the Five Positions. But I’ll say this. What happened in Yemen was lawless. If we repeat that, and make a habit of repeating that, and forget what it’s like to be civilized, then we haven’t fixed anything.”
The meeting broke up and Williams went back to think about what he and Berry had set in motion.
No one is wrong, he said. The problem is, it also doesn’t necessarily make anyone right.
Fortu
nately, Williams’s concerns were less subtle, less complex.
All he had to do was try and stop whatever contagion had been let loose in the world.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Prince Edward Island, South Africa
November 11, 10:09 P.M.
As his helicopter neared its destination, Dr. Raeburn was alarmed to see the sleek Chinese ship below the island’s high ledge and a patrol boat moving toward the cover that was home to Ship Rock. It wasn’t national sovereignty that concerned him but the contents of the pit at Ship Rock.
At least the sailors were not at the internment site. Not yet. And it was actually encouraging to see the activity inside the bridge of the corvette. The bug was either lost in the atmosphere or depleted. Perhaps there was nothing left in the pit.
He needed orders from Krummeck and he dared not communicate on the helicopter’s open radio. Fortunately, he knew where he could get a secure line.
Raeburn, the pilot, and the copilot were wearing masks, so they communicated by text through the internal silent-running system. Dr. Raeburn wrote:
Do not report to Simon
The pilot replied:
Civil Aviation may spot
Raeburn answered:
May not coming to Marion from NW. Dangerous
for SA pilots. Must land tell PLAN to leave.
The pilot acknowledged with a nod.
All of what Raeburn had said was true. Focused on their approach to the crash site, the two amphibious planes might be coming in too low to see the corvette. The mountains of Prince Edward would block the pair of helicopters. He also did not want South African Air Force pilots racing down in response. That was not just for their own safety. Raeburn and Krummeck still were at risk of being exposed. He did not want additional eyes on the microbial burial ground until he could seal it.
The question was what to do first. He had to get in there to see what conditions were. Of course, the Chinese would follow.
If they knew where to look they would be doing it, he thought. But if they take the AH-2 crew aboard, they’ll have it anyway in throat swabs.
It suddenly occurred to Raeburn that there was something worse than both of those possibilities.
