Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  Two Weeks Later United Nations General Assembly

  On the way up to New York from Langley, McGarvey had a lot to think about. There was a new, troubling situation heating up in the Balkans, more unrest in Greece, rumors that someone at the highest levels inside the Mexican government was in bed with the leading drug cartels, and Castro’s successor was courting Pakistan for nuclear technology.

  The funeral for Tom Preston had been a quiet affair at Arlington, with only a handful of friends and relatives. He hadn’t been married, and there weren’t any children. There’d been some confusion about who he was, but the Taiwanese Coast Guard had finally gotten it figured out, and his body had been flown home.

  The Chinese Navy and Air Force had finished their extensive exercise, packed up their toys, and gone home all of a sudden with no explanation about Peter Shizong, or about the apparent destruction of two submarines, an American boat somewhere off Taiwan’s north coast and a PRC boat a couple of hours later and fifty miles north. There were no survivors.

  The media never got the last story, and at the diplomatic level China and the U.S. politely avoided mentioning the issue at all. It was, as far as both sides were concerned, a completely fair and equitable exchange.

  That was a position that the Chinese would regret having taken, McGarvey thought with pleasure as he got off the elevator on the third floor. He crossed the hall and after he showed his credentials was allowed inside the sky boxes, where the translators worked looking down on the General Assembly.

  Captain Joseph Jiying, in civilian clothes, jumped up from where he was watching the proceedings, a big grin on his face. “Good to see you, Mr. McGarvey,” he said. They shook hands.

  “My friends call me Mac, and it’s really good to see you in one piece.”

  “It was a little hairy there for a couple of hours, but we finally realized the error of our patriotic zeal, and we gave up. No casualties.”

  U.S. Ambassador Margaret Woolsey had just come to the podium amid some polite applause.

  “You might want to check out Chou en Ping. He’s the PRC’s ambassador to the UN,” Jiying said. He was enjoying himself to the max. “The poor bastard doesn’t know what’s about to hit him.”

  “It’s not going to be so easy,” McGarvey said.

  “You’re right, of course,” Jiying said, suddenly very serious. “Maybe it’ll take another hundred years for the mainland to recognize who and what Taiwan has become. Look how long it took before Hong Kong went back.” He smiled and nodded as a very large round of applause swept across the General Assembly. “But ain’t it great to win once in a while? You know, truth, justice, and the American way?”

  Down on the floor Peter Shizong was slowly making his way to the podium, shaking hands as he and his UN-supplied bodyguards were completely mobbed by well-wishers.

  McGarvey took a pair of binoculars from Jiying and tried to spot Chou en Ping and the Chinese delegation at their seats, but they had already gotten up and were marching up a side aisle for the exits.

  He handed the binoculars back. “Gotta go.”

  “What’s your rush, it’s just getting good,” Jiying said.

  “I’m meeting a friend for drinks. And then our wives are coming up to join us.”

  “Anyone I should know?”

  McGarvey shook his head. “Just an old friend. A submarine driver. Good man to have around in a pinch.”

  DAVID HAGBERG is an ex-Air Force cryptographer who has spoken at CIA functions and traveled extensively in Europe, the Arctic, and the Caribbean. He also writes fiction under the pseudonym Sean Flannery, and has published more than two dozen novels of suspense, including White House, High Flight, Eagles Fly, Assassin, and Joshua’s Hammer. His writing has been nominated for numerous honors, including the American Book Award, three times for the Edgar Allan Poe award, and three times for the American Mystery award. He lives in Florida, and has been continuously published for the past twenty-five years.

  INSIDE JOB

  BY DEAN ING

  One

  “The longer I live, the more I realize the less I know for sure.” That’s what my friend Quentin Kim used to mutter to me and curvy little Dana Martin in our Public Safety classes at San Jose State. Dana would frown because she revered conventional wisdom. I’d always chuckle, because I thought Quent was kidding. But that was years ago, and I was older then.

  I mean, I thought I knew it all. “Public Safety” is genteel academic code for cop coursework, and while Quent had already built himself an enviable rep as a licensed P.I. in the Bay Area, he hadn’t been a big-city cop. I went on to become one, until I got fed up with the cold war between guys on the take and guys in Internal Affairs, both sides angling for recruits. I tried hard to avoid getting their crap on my size thirteen brogans while I lost track of Dana, saw Quent infrequently, and served the City of Oakland’s plainclothes detail in the name of public safety.

  So much for stepping carefully in such a barnyard. At least I got out with honor after a few years, and I still had contacts around Oakland on both sides of the law. Make that several sides; and to an investigator that’s worth more than diamonds. It would’ve taken a better man than Harve Rackham to let those contacts go to waste, which is why I became the private kind of investigator, aka gumshoe, peeper, or just plain Rackham, P.I.

  Early success can destroy you faster than a palmed ice pick, especially if it comes through luck you thought was skill. A year into my new career, I talked my way into a seam job—a kidnapping within a disintegrating family. The kidnapped boy’s father, a Sunnyvale software genius, wanted the kid back badly enough to throw serious money at his problem. After a few days of frustration, I shot my big mouth off about it to my sister’s husband, Ernie.

  It was a lucky shot, though. Ernie was with NASA at Moffett Field and by sheer coincidence he knew a certain Canadian physicist. I’d picked up a rumor that the physicist had been playing footsie with the boy’s vanished mother.

  The physicist had a Quebecois accent, Ernie recalled, and had spoken longingly about a teaching career. The man had already given notice at NASA without a forwarding address. He was Catholic. A little digging told me that might place him at the University of Montreal, a Catholic school which gives instruction in French. I caught a Boeing 787 and got there before he did, and guess who was waiting with her five-year-old boy in the Montreal apartment the physicist had leased.

  I knew better than to dig very far into the reasons why Mama took Kiddie and left Papa. It was enough that she’d fled the country illegally. The check I cashed was so much more than enough that I bought a decaying farmhouse twenty miles and a hundred years from Oakland.

  Spending so much time away, I figured I’d need to fence the five acres of peaches and grapes, but the smithy was what sold me. “The smith, a mighty man was he, with large and sinewy,” et cetera. Romantic bullshit, sure, but as I said, I knew it all then. And I wanted to build an off-road racer, one of the diesel-electric hybrids that were just becoming popular. I couldn’t imagine a better life than peeping around the Port of Oakland for money, and hiding out on my acreage whenever I had some time off, building my big lightning-on-wheels toy.

  And God knows, I had plenty of time off after that! Didn’t the word get out that I was hot stuff? Weren’t more rich guys clamoring for my expensive services? Wasn’t I slated for greatness?

  In three words: no, no, and no. I didn’t even invest in a slick Web site while I still had the money, with only a line in the yellow pages, so I didn’t get many calls. I was grunting beneath my old gasoline-fueled Toyota pickup one April afternoon, chasing an oil leak because I couldn’t afford to have someone else do it, when my cell phone warbled.

  Quentin Kim; I was grinning in an instant. “I thought I was good, but it’s humbling when I can’t find something as big as you,” he bitched.

  I squoze my hundred kilos from under the Toyota. “You mean you’re looking for me now? Today?”

  “I have driven that
country road three times, Harvey. My GP mapper’s no help. Where the devil are you?”

  Even his cussing was conservative. When Quent used my full given name, he was a quart low on patience. I told him to try the road again and I’d flag him down, and he did, and twenty minutes later I guided his Volvo Electrabout up the lane to my place.

  He emerged looking fit, a few grey hairs but the almond eyes still raven-bright, the smile mellow, unchanged. I ignored the limp; maybe his shoes pinched. From force of habit and ethnic Korean good manners, Quent avoided staring around him, but I knew he would miss very little as I invited him through the squinchy old screen door into my authentic 1910 kitchen with its woodstove. He didn’t relax until we continued to the basement, the fluorescents obediently flickering on along the stairs.

  “You had me worried for a minute,” he said, now with a frankly approving glance at my office. As fin de siècle as the house was from the foundation up, I’d fixed it all Frank Gehry and Starship Enterprise below. He perched his butt carefully on the stool at my drafting carrel; ran his hand along the flat catatonic stare of my Magnascreen. “But you must be doing all right for yourself. Some of this has got to be expensive stuff, Harve.”

  “Pure sweat equity, most of it.” I shrugged. “I do adhesive bonding, some welding, cabinetry,—oh, I was a whiz in shop, back in high school.”

  “Don’t try to imply that you missed your real calling. I notice you’re working under your own license since a year ago. Can people with budgets still afford you?”

  “I won’t shit you, Quent, but don’t spread this around. Way things are right now, anybody can afford me.”

  It had been over a year since we’d watched World Cup soccer matches together, and while we caught each other up on recent events, I brewed tea for him in my six-cup glass rig with its flash boiler.

  He didn’t make me ask about the limp. “You know how those old alleyway fire-escape ladders get rickety after sixty years or so,” he told me, shifting his leg. “A few months ago I was closing on a bail-jumper who’d been living on a roof in Alameda, and the ladder came loose on us.” Shy smile, to forestall sympathy. “He hit the bricks. I bounced off a Dumpster.” Shrug.

  “Bring him in?”

  “The paramedics brought us both in, but I got my fee,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you how an HMO views our work, and I’m not indigent. Fixing this hip cost me a lot more than I made, and legwork will never be my forte again, I’m afraid.”

  I folded my arms and attended to the beep of my tea rig. “You’re telling me you were bounty hunting,” I said. It wasn’t exactly an accusation, but most P.I.s won’t work for bail bondsmen. It’s pretty demanding work, though the money can be good when you negotiate a fifteen percent fee and then bring in some scuffler who’s worth fifty large.

  While we sipped tea, we swapped sob stories, maintaining a light touch because nobody had forced either of us into the peeper business. You hear a lot about P.I.s being churlish to each other. Mostly a myth, beyond some healthy competition. “I suppose I couldn’t resist the challenge,” said Quent. “You know me, always trying to expand my education. As a bounty hunter you learn a lot, pretty quickly.”

  “Like, don’t trust old fire escapes,” I said.

  “Like that,” he agreed. “But it also brings you to the attention of a different class of client. It might surprise even you that some Fed agencies will subcontract an investigation, given special circumstances.”

  It surprised me less when he said that the present circumstances required someone who spoke Hangul, the Korean language, and knew the dockside world around Oakland. Someone the Federal Bureau of Investigation could trust.

  “Those guys,” I said, “frost my cojones. It’s been my experience that they’ll let metro cops take most of the chances and zero percent of the credit.”

  “Credit is what you buy groceries with, Harve,” he said. “What do we care, so long as the Feds will hire us again?”

  “Whoa. What’s that word again? Us, as in you and me?”

  “If you’ll take it. I need an extra set of feet—hips, if you insist—and it doesn’t hurt that you carry the air of plainclothes cop with you. And with your size, you can handle yourself, which is something I might need.”

  He mentioned a fee, including a daily rate, and I managed not to whistle. “I need to know more. This gonna be something like a bodyguard detail, Quent? I don’t speak Hangul, beyond a few phrases you taught me.”

  “That’s only part of it. Most people we’ll interview speak plain American; record checks, for example. The case involves a marine engineer missing from the tramp motorship Ras Ormara, which is tied up for round-the-clock refitting at a Richmond wharf. He’s Korean. Coast Guard and FBI would both like to find him, without their being identified.”

  There’s an old cop saying about Richmond, California: it’s vampire turf. Safe enough in daylight, but watch your neck at night. “I suppose you’ve already tried Missing Persons.”

  Quent served me a “give me a break” look. “I don’t have to tell you the metro force budget is petty cash, Harve. They’re overloaded with domestic cases. The Feds know it, which is where we come in—if you want in.”

  “Got me over a barrel. You want the truth, I’m practically wearing the goddamn barrel. Any idea how long the case will last?”

  Quent knew I was really asking how many days’ pay it might involve. “It evaporates the day the Ras Ormara leaves port; perhaps a week. That doesn’t give us as much time as I’d like, but every case sets its own pace.”

  That was another old Quentism, and I’d come to learn it was true. This would be a hot pace, so no wonder gimpy Quentin Kim was offering to share the workload. Instead of doping out his selfish motives, I should be thanking him, so I did. I added, “You don’t know it, but you’re offering me a bundle of chrome-moly racer frame tubing and a few rolls of cyclone fence. An offer I can’t refuse, but I’d like to get a dossier on this Korean engineer right away.”

  “I can do better than that,” said Quent, “and it’ll come with a free supper tonight, courtesy of the Feds.”

  “They’re buying? Now, that is impressive as hell.”

  “I have not begun to impress,” Quent said, again with the shy smile. “Coast Guard Lieutenant Reuben Medler is fairly impressive, but the FBI liaison will strain your belief system.”

  “Never happen,” I said. “They still look like IBM salesmen.”

  “Not this one. Trust me.” Now Quent was grinning.

  “You’re wrong,” I insisted.

  “What do you think happened to the third of our classroom musketeers, Harve, and why do you think this case was dropped in my lap? The Feebie is Dana Martin,” he said.

  I kept my jaw from sagging with some effort. “You were right,” I said.

  Until the fight started, I assumed Quent had chosen Original Joe’s in San Jose because we—Dana included—had downed many an abalone supreme there in earlier times. If some of the clientele were reputedly Connected with a capital C, that only kept folks polite. Quent and I met there and copped a booth, though our old habit had been to take seats at the counter where we could watch chefs with wrists of steel handle forty-centimeter skillets over three-alarm gas burners. I was halfway through a bottle of Anchor Steam when a well-built specimen in a crewneck sweater, trim Dockers, and tasseled loafers ushered his date in. He carried himself as if hiding a small flagpole in the back of his sweater. I looked away, denying my envy. How is it some guys never put on an ounce while guys like me outgrow our belts?

  Then I did a double take. The guy had to be Lieutenant Medler because the small, tanned, sharp-eyed confection in mid-heels and severely tailored suit was Dana Martin, no longer an overconfident kid. I think I said “wow” silently as we stood up.

  After the introductions Medler let us babble about how long it had been. For me, the measure of elapsed time was that little Miz Martin had developed a sense of reserve. Then while we decided what we want
ed to eat, Medler explained why shoreline poachers had taken abalone off the Original Joe menu. Mindful of who was picking up the tab, I ordered the latest fad entrée: Nebraska longhorn T-bone, lean as ostrich and just as spendy. Dana’s lip pursed but she kept it buttoned, cordial, impersonal. I decided she’d bought into her career and its image. Damn, but I hated that …

  Over the salads, Medler gave his story without editorializing, deferential to us, more so to Dana, in a soft baritone all the more masculine for discarding machismo. “The Ras Ormara is a C-1 motorship under Liberian registry,” he said, “chartered by the Sonmiani Tramp Service of Karachi, Pakistan.” He recited carefully, as if speaking for a recorder. Which he was, though I didn’t say so. What the hell, people forget things.

  “Some of these multinational vessels just beg for close inspection, the current foreign political situation being what it is,” Medler went on. He didn’t need to mention the nuke found by a French airport security team the previous month, on an Arab prince’s Learjet at Charles De Gaulle terminal. “We did a walk-through. The vessel was out of Lima with a cargo of balsa logs and nontoxic plant extract slurry, bound for Richmond. Crew was the usual polyglot bunch, in this case chiefly Pakis and Koreans. They stay aboard in port unless they have the right papers.”

  At this point Medler abruptly began talking about how abalone poachers work, a second before the waitress arrived to serve our entrées. Quent nodded appreciatively and I toasted Medler’s coolth with my beer.

  Once we’d attacked our meals he resumed. Maybe the editorial came with the main course. “You know about Asian working-class people and eye contact—with apologies, Mr. Kim. But one young Korean in the crew was boring holes in my corneas. I decided to interview three men, one at a time, on the fo’c’sle deck. At random, naturally.”

  “Random as loaded dice.” I winked.

  “With their skipper right there? Affirmative, and I started with the ship’s medic. When I escorted this young third engineer, Park Soon, on deck the poor guy was shaking. His English wasn’t that fluent, and he didn’t say much, even to direct questions, but he did say we had to talk ashore. ‘Must talk,’ was the phrase. He had his papers to go ashore.