Shadows of War

by Larry Bond

  And yet it was. They were so engrossed in their own conversation and the cigarettes they were smoking that they didn’t hear him until he was only a meter or two away. By then it was too late—the captain pushed aside a large fern and stood two arm’s lengths away.

  “Captain!” said the man on the right, jumping up.

  Startled, his companion jerked to his feet as well. As he did, he dropped a phone he’d been holding.

  Incensed, Lai reached to his belt and took out his pistol.

  “You have disobeyed your orders,” he told them, struggling to control his emotions. The words sputtered from his mouth, his anger twisting his tongue. “What are you doing here?”

  “Captain, we needed a rest and—”

  “Silence!” Lai pointed the pistol at them. “You rest when you are given the order to rest. What’s that mobile phone doing?”

  Neither man spoke. Mobile phones and other communications devices were strictly prohibited to most of the Chinese army; even an officer like Lai was not allowed a personal phone and had to account strictly for his use of the satellite radio.

  “The cell phone!” repeated Lai. He pointed the gun at the man who had dropped it.

  “Captain, it is a satellite phone,” stuttered the man. “It doesn’t—it-it—.” He cut himself off in midsentence and dropped to his knees, begging for his life.

  The captain’s anger only grew. He extended his arm, the pressure growing in his finger to fire. Finally, he did—and only a last-second force of will pushed the aim of the barrel straight up, sending the bullet harmlessly into the sky.

  “Why do you have the phone?” said Lai after the shot finished echoing against the hillside.

  The man on his knees could not respond, so Lai looked at his companion.

  “We—we found it, c-clearing the d-dead with the commandos. Y-yesterday. It doesn’t work, Captain. There is a code—it won’t come to life. He just wanted to talk to his wife about his n-new son.”

  “The commandos took satellite phones?”

  For a brief moment, Lai’s spirit soared—here was something he could use to get back not just at the uppity lieutenant who had commandeered his men, but at Colonel Sun himself. But the look on the private’s face quickly brought him back to earth.

  “They d-d-didn’t see,” answered the private. “We—”

  “Weren’t you ordered not to take anything?” asked the captain, not quite ready to give up the possibility of revenge.

  “Y-y-yes.”

  “Get down the hill both of you,” Lai told them. “Find your sergeant and find your right places in the search. Go. Go now! Before I change my mind!”

  The man who had fallen to his knees now dropped on his face, tears flowing from his eyes in gratitude. He began to babble about his son—the newborn they had apparently been speaking of earlier—and how the captain’s name would be added to the child’s.

  “Go!” said Lai sharply.

  The other man dragged him down the hill.

  Lai waited until they were out of his sight, then picked up the phone. His first thought was to chuck it into the trees. But someone might find it there, and it would easily be traced back to his unit. If he was going to dispose of it, he would have to find a much better place.

  Maybe there was still a way to use it to discredit the commandos. Perhaps an idea would occur to him. He tucked it into his belt and began walking back to the crest of the hill.

  Lai would have been fully within his rights as captain to execute both men. If anything, it was his decision to show the men mercy that might be questioned. They had not only disobeyed his orders for conducting the search, but disobeyed general orders in possessing the phone—a much graver matter.

  He was fairly certain that neither man would speak of the incident, but if they did, Lai might get the reputation of being a “soft” commander, and one who did not care whether his orders were followed or not.

  Being a drunk was not necessarily something that would bar one’s promotion; being soft was.

  He hated the army.

  Josh had been sitting on the rock for nearly an hour when he heard the soldier making his way up through the jungle toward him. His first thought was that he had been surrounded, and that the man below was trying to flush him out. Then he realized that was unlikely. Whoever he was hearing was moving slowly, not walking directly toward him but following the channel the water had made.

  Josh slipped off the rock and moved to a nearby cluster of chest-high bushes, ducking behind them.

  The soldier’s head appeared above the rocks. He climbed up onto the rock where Josh had been sitting, then leaned back, resting.

  Josh sprang forward. He started to bring the rifle up to use as a club, but the man began turning in his direction.

  Josh lowered the rifle and slid his finger into the trigger.

  He saw the surprise on the man’s face, then the little geysers of dust rising from the rock next to the soldier, then from the soldier himself.

  Gray dust from the rock. Red from the soldier.

  The man looked up into his face and started to say something, his chubby lips opening into a question. Then he fell back into the dried streambed.

  Josh ran to him, and stared down at his face. There was no expression on it now, just a kind of numb emptiness, the eyes staring without comprehension.

  The man had had a satellite phone in his hand. As he picked it up, Josh realized it was an AsiaSat2 unit, the same type that the expedition had used.

  Josh’s anger erupted. He went back to the body and stomped on the dead man’s face with his heel, fury unleashed in a violent surge that left him physically drained after only a few seconds. Still he kept stomping, kicking the man for what seemed like hours.

  When he stopped, he didn’t feel any pleasure; he felt no satisfaction or even justification. He felt only trembling exhaustion.

  The gunshot would have been heard for several miles, and others would be reacting. He wasn’t going to be lucky like he had been before. This man had an insignia—he was an officer. People would care about him. They would look for him, and want revenge.

  Josh had to get out of here—now.

  He bent down to see if the man had anything useful. There was a pistol on his belt, and a canteen—Josh jerked the canteen free and drained about a quarter of it in a single gulp. Coughing, he stopped and caught his breath, then took another drink, slower, more measured—the water had a metal taste, though not nearly bad enough to make him spit it out.

  Capping the steel bottle, he stood silently for a moment, listening.

  There was nothing. It was as if he and the Chinese soldier had been the only two people in the world, and now it was just him.

  A dangerous illusion. They would be running to see what the shots were. He had to get as far away from here as he could. Then he could use the phone to call for help.

  Josh put the water bottle in his left pocket, then hiked his jeans and tucked the pistol into the front of his waistband. Glancing at his battered boots, he started climbing back over the ridge, rifle ready.

  7

  Bangkok

  Peter Lucas leaned back in the chair, reaching for his bottle of water as the Air Force intelligence officer began reviewing the satellite data on the Chinese attack for the rest of the participants in the videoconference. Lucas had seen most of this intelligence an hour ago. Gathered from a pair of electronic “ferret” or signal eavesdropping satellites that had been moved into the area, the data indicated a huge jump in traffic on bands associated with a cross section of the Chinese military. In layman’s terms: the Chinese were streaming over the border like lava from a volcano.

  An admiral from PACOM spoke next, saying that the Navy had no ships closer than a full day’s sail from the coast of Vietnam, and it would take several days to get anything bigger than a destroyer there. A P-3 Orion had been scrambled to cover the coast, looking for Chinese submarines, but at the moment that was the extent of the Navy’
s effort in the area. If American citizens were going to be evacuated from Vietnam—

  “My God, we don’t want photos like that,” blurted Harold Park. As the CIA’s director of operations or DDO, he was the number two man in the agency. He was a good DDO, and an even better agency politician.

  Which was good for Lucas, unless he somehow ended up as designated scapegoat if things went terribly wrong.

  People escaping from the roof of the U.S. embassy would qualify. But so would a lot of other things—most of which they probably couldn’t think of.

  “At the rate the Chinese are moving, they’ll reach Lai Châu by nightfall,” said Sara Mai, the deputy national security director for South Asia. She was speaking from a plane, and while the connection was clear, there was a low hum whenever she spoke, the noise-canceling gear not quite successful in cutting out the sound of the engines.

  “That’s if they don’t turn east and go to the river,” said the chief of staff, Army General Clayton Fisk. “Which they can also reach by then.”

  “We don’t believe they’ll turn east,” said Mai.

  “Really? You have data to back that up?”

  “We’re working on a theory—”

  “Data,” repeated Fisk, using the tone he would have used to browbeat an underling. Lucas always pictured Fisk chewing on a cigar—he had the jowls of a bulldog, and that pretty much described his manner.

  “We’re looking at the same intelligence you are,” answered Mai sharply.

  Walter Jackson, the national security adviser and Mai’s boss, stepped in to quash the argument before it started.

  “Tom, do you have anything new for us?” he said, talking to Thomas Mengzi, the deputy head of the CIA’s Chinese station. Mengzi was sitting in for Michael Dalton, who’d flown to Russia two days before and was still in Moscow.

  “Just more of what I said at the top,” Mengzi told Jackson. “The Chinese say they were attacked. They claim there’s plenty of evidence. Rumor has it we caught it on satellite.”

  “We do have some images,” said the Air Force analyst. “There were troop trucks. Hard to tell at this moment if they were Vietnamese, though they seem to have come out of the country.”

  Has to be a setup, thought Lucas, though he didn’t say it.

  “All right. Thank you all for the update,” said Jackson, who as national security adviser had chaired the session. “We’ll reconvene for a fresh update at 2100 Washington time.”

  Lucas stayed on the line, waiting for Park to come back.

  “You wanted a word, Peter?” asked the DDO, his face flashing on the screen. Either the camera or the technology subtly altered the shape of his face, making it even rounder than it was in person.

  “One of my people was in a plane that was shot at by the Chinese air force and forced to land,” said Lucas. “She’s okay. But she’s stranded up near the border.”

  “I see.”

  “I’d like to take her out.”

  “How?”

  “I haven’t settled on the exact plan.”

  “She? Who is it?”

  “Mara Duncan. The PM who was reassigned out of Malaysia. I needed someone clean to contact our Belgian friend. He didn’t show. She went looking for him.”

  “The wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “I guess it depends on your perspective. She’s the one that first told us the Chinese were definitely over the border. Her information came at least an hour before the satellites picked anything up.”

  Park wasn’t impressed. “Where exactly is she?”

  “Nam Det. We ran that operation into Xin Jie, China, from there a few months ago.”

  Park nodded but said nothing.

  “I’m pretty confident we can get an airplane onto the field,” said Lucas when the silence grew too long.

  “Not under these circumstances.”

  “I can’t leave her there.”

  Park didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  “All right,” said Lucas finally. “That’s all I have right now.”

  The screen blanked. Lucas took a swig from his water, then unlocked the door and went outside to the small lounge area, grabbing a cup of coffee before proceeding down the hall to Secure Room 1, where Jesse DeBiase was coordinating the efforts to wring as much intelligence as possible from the various sponges and stones the CIA had planted throughout Southeast Asia over the past decade.

  “How we doing, Million Dollar Man?” asked Lucas.

  “We’re doing. Very slowly. Nothing real to report. The Vietnamese still don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

  “That’s the assessment there?”

  “That’s my assessment. I don’t trust Hanoi. But yes, when you pick through what they said.”

  DeBiase knew all about the situation there. He was, in fact, Lucas’s first choice to become the new station chief—though he clearly didn’t want the job.

  “And what do our people say?”

  “They think the real attack is going to come in the east. Probably that’s the majority view of the government as well. Like I say, they’re so confused they don’t know which way is up.” DeBiase wheeled his seat forward a few inches. “Who’s going for Mara?”

  Lucas grimaced, and pulled over a chair.

  “We’re leaving her there?” said DeBiase.

  “I don’t know what we’re doing. Park doesn’t want us sending anyone into the area.”

  “We can’t leave her.”

  “Just because she’s a woman, Jesse, doesn’t mean she can’t take care of herself.”

  Lucas turned the screen on the computer next to DeBiase, and started paging through the recent communications.

  “Seriously, what are we going to do?” asked DeBiase.

  “Seriously, I don’t know. I’ve been told we’re not allowed to run any operations in Vietnam.” Lucas kept his eyes fixed on the screen, partly in hopes of reading something that would give him an idea of what precisely he should do.

  “Peter, we can’t leave her on her own up there. Her Vietnamese is patchy. She has no equipment. God knows how banged up she is after the plane crash. She was never supposed to be in that area in the first place. If the Chinese find her, she’ll be taken prisoner. The Vietnamese will do the same thing.”

  Lucas continued paging through the data, which was an unfiltered hodgepodge of reports, ranging from NSA intercept summaries to second- and thirdhand accounts sent via instant message to CIA officers around the world. The real trick wasn’t getting information—there was tons of it here. It was organizing it into a coherent shape. And the more there was, the harder that became.

  “It doesn’t look like they’re heading in her direction,” Lucas said finally. “It looks from this that they’re going directly south.”

  “She’s not all that far from Lao Cai.”

  “Far enough.”

  “Peter, we can’t leave her there.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” said Lucas. “Then I’ll figure out how we’ll get her.”

  “She’s supposed to call in another hour.”

  “I don’t want to wait. Call her now.”

  “She turned her phone off to conserve the batteries.”

  “Sounds like Mara,” said Lucas. “Always thinking ahead.”

  8

  Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China

  Josh crossed over the ridge and walked for at least an hour before taking the satellite phone from his pocket. The delay was an act of will, a test to see if he could withstand temptation—to demonstrate to himself that he had the mental toughness he needed to survive. Because to survive, he could not give in to temptation, and he suspected that there would be many more instances of temptation before he reached safety. So he left the phone in his pocket as he walked south, skirting the edge of the fields he’d seen earlier, moving parallel to the hilltops until finding a dry streambed gouged into the hill.

  A cluster of half a dozen houses sat in the lap of two hills bet
ween the terraced fields. Josh skirted it, walking deeper into the jungle. He’d have to stay away from the settlements, at least during the day; anyone pursuing him would search there first. With water and a gun, he could wait until nightfall to get food.

  He would wait. He would do what he had to do to survive.

  South of the village, surrounded by thick jungle, Josh finally allowed himself to examine the phone. There were no markings on it, but he was convinced it was one of the team’s. It looked exactly like his—so much so that only when his personal ID didn’t unlock it was he sure it wasn’t.

  The model was designed so that it wouldn’t turn on unless its owner’s identification code was entered properly. But it came from the factory with a default code. Josh wondered if maybe its owner hadn’t changed it. Most people, he’d heard, didn’t bother.

  But what had the code been? He seemed to remember that it had been four similar digits. He tried the 0’s, then 1’s. Neither worked. 2’s, 3’s—he went through all of the digits without unlocking it.

  It had to be one of those. Maybe if he took the battery out, the memory would die and the code would reset.

  Josh tried it, then hit 0-0-0-0. Again he got a PIN failed message. He tried 1-1-1-1.

  “Locked,” flashed on the screen.

  He snapped the red Off button, angry.

  Stay in control, he told himself. With or without the phone, you’ll get out of here. With or without it.

  Sliding the phone into his pocket, he began walking again. It was starting to get dark. He had trouble seeing until he stumbled onto a narrow dirt trail, nearly falling as he pushed past some brush. He took a quick step back, looking left and right to make sure no one was nearby. Not trusting his eyes, he remained motionless a while longer, listening for any sound. Finally satisfied, he turned to the left and began walking along the edge of the path, moving as quietly as he could.