by Larry Bond
Or thought he’d seen. The boundaries between experience and dream seemed to have eroded.
And nightmare.
The fire threw up sparks as the frogs roasted. He picked at the skin of the first frog’s leg, burning the tips of his fingers. He managed to pull the flesh out, then lost it as it slipped to the ground.
He used his teeth on the second leg. The meat was tender, not really like chicken as some people said, unique.
He ate two more, quickly. Then a third and fourth.
He took his time with the fifth, hunger nearly satiated. Josh savored the bites, trying to work out the taste—not really fishlike, yet it seemed closer to that than chicken.
Something rustled in the brush. Two eyes looked at him from the dark shadows, their whites glowing with the reflection of the fire.
The girl.
“Here,” said Josh, lifting the half-eaten frog toward her. “I can cook some for you.”
She didn’t move.
“I’ll make a fresh one. Here.”
He leaned over and took another frog, holding it away from her as he poked the stick through its mouth and then out its body. Then he put it over the fire.
“They’re good,” he told the girl. “You have to eat. You need to eat.”
She was still staring at him. A good sign. He tried to remember the Vietnamese word for hello, but stress had drained his vocabulary away.
“How old are you?” Josh asked, still speaking English. “Five? Seven? I have a cousin who’s eight. I think he’s eight. I lose track. Maybe he’s ten. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
He reached and turned the stick, roasting the other side of the frog.
“My name is Josh. I’m a scientist. I study weather. It’s a good thing to study these days. A lot of call for it. Because it’s changing, you know. And, um, everything changes with it. These frogs, probably. I’ll guess they’re higher than they used to be. I mean their range. Probably it wasn’t up this high. They’re adapting, or they will adapt. They’re following their food source. I don’t know a lot about frogs, but that’s not exactly a radical guess. They are frogs.”
He stopped speaking and looked down at the animal on the skewer. “I think they’re frogs, not toads. Fauna’s not my thing.”
The girl took a step forward, parting the brush. She wore traditional Vietnamese pajamalike clothes, but her shoes were Western-style sneakers, cheap knockoffs that you could get in most Asian cities. Josh crouched down to her level, trying to make himself look less threatening.
“You can eat,” he said.
She launched herself forward, streaking toward him so quickly that his only reaction was to flinch, thinking she was going to bowl into him. Instead, she grabbed the frog and continued past him, escaping into the woods beyond.
“Hey!” he shouted, but she didn’t stop.
He jumped up just in time to see her disappear into the jungle. Josh stood for a second, unsure what to do. Then he grabbed his rifle and started after her, worried that she would go all the way out to the highway.
He had lost sight of her, but he could hear her running through the brush. He followed along for thirty or forty meters, falling farther and farther behind. He could see only a few meters through the shadows and the trees; with every step the light seemed to fade further, until at last he could barely see to the tips of his extended hands.
Josh stopped and listened, quieting his breath as best he could so he could hear. She was somewhere ahead, not too far, maybe only a few yards, moving slower than before.
Did it really make sense to try and catch her? It wasn’t like he could talk to her. The only reason to grab her was to keep her from telling the Chinese about him if she was captured.
That was the only logical reason. He’d followed her—why?
Because he wanted her to be his friend. He wanted her to realize he was on her side, he was one of the good guys.
A poor reason to risk his life. Yet he felt compelled to continue after her.
Six or seven steps farther on, Josh heard the sound of heavy vehicles moving in the distance—Chinese troop trucks, no doubt, coming down the highway. He moved a little faster, threading his way through the thick brush and trees.
Something swiped his face. He rebounded, thinking it was a snake and then realizing it was just a tree frond he hadn’t seen. But his reaction threw him off balance; he stumbled to his left, crashed against a tree, and fell over.
Josh lay facedown in the brush, not thinking, not encouraging himself, not despairing. He got to his knees slowly, listening, in full survival mode, listening and only listening.
There were other sounds ahead, something else moving through the jungle.
Voices.
Chinese.
He focused his eyes on the jungle before him. The brush parted—the girl, running to his left.
Two figures in gray swept across from the right.
Josh’s rifle had slipped from his shoulder as he fell. Before he could grab his pistol, the girl and the soldiers disappeared.
Two more figures crashed through the brush, five yards away.
They were nearly next to each other. Two hands on the gun, he fired quickly, taking both down. Then something else took over—Josh leaped up, ran, and without thinking about what he was doing, fired point-blank into the skulls of both fallen soldiers. He swept down, grabbed their rifles, pulling them off the fallen men. He pushed over the bodies, grabbed clips—big banana-style clips. He dropped the pistol—the clip was empty—and left the rifle he’d been using, walking in the direction the other soldiers had taken, moving slowly and as quietly as he could, all of his attention focused on following them. No stray thought, no emotion or feeling, interfered with his eyes or ears.
She will go toward the fire, and they will follow her.
Josh veered left. He began moving sideways, keeping his eyes focused on the direction they had gone, but still moving toward the fire. After five or six yards he stopped and listened—he could hear sounds but not make them out.
The fire was a red glow directly in front of him, thirty yards away.
The girl screamed.
Josh resisted the urge to charge ahead. He walked even slower, sifting through the trees, drifting there as if a leaf being pushed by the gentlest of breezes.
The two soldiers were smacking the girl’s face.
Josh brought one of the rifles up and aimed. But at this range, in the dark, with a gun he’d never fired before, he worried that he wasn’t a good enough shot to ensure he’d hit just the soldier, not the girl.
He started to sift closer.
One of the men grabbed her from behind and began shaking her.
Do not charge them. Wait. Move forward.
One step, two steps.
The other man yelled something, angry. He looked in Josh’s direction.
He’d heard something.
The soldier holding the girl threw her down.
Now!
The gun was set on full automatic. Josh emptied the clip in a quick sweep. Out of bullets, he threw the gun down, grabbed the other off his shoulder left-handed, the trigger wrong, everything wrong except what he was doing, except what he had to do.
One of the soldiers was down. The other staggered to his right.
The rifle jumped in Josh’s hand. Some of the bullets went wild. The rest did their work.
The girl was still lying on the ground, dazed, when Josh reached her, sliding on his knee next to her side.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Okay, okay.”
She looked at him, big eyes, no voice.
“Did they shoot you?”
She blinked. There was no blood on her that he could see, no wounds.
“Come on,” he said, jumping up. He went to the soldiers, took a pistol, as many mags as he could stuff in his pocket and beltline. His heart was pounding.
The girl was still on the ground.
“We go! We go!” he told her, running back.
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br /> He reached down and grabbed her shirt. She winced, injured somewhere he couldn’t see.
“Come on, we go, we go,” he told her.
He lifted her to her feet. She wasn’t crying, but she was more than scared.
“Up, we go,” he said, and he bent down and levered her up onto his shoulder before turning and starting off in the forest, away from the fire and dead soldiers.
10
Northern Vietnam
Of all the unmanned aircraft and drones the U.S. military operated, “Gumdrop” was arguably the strangest looking. Roughly the size of an executive’s desk, it had a sharply faceted body and two wing surfaces, located almost on top of each other biplane-style, about a third of the way from the nose. The wings changed shape, thanks to gas-filled bladders inside them. It couldn’t go very fast, largely because its engine was so small, but the wing arrangement made it extremely maneuverable.
The small engine was a handicap in another way—it could handle only a limited payload, especially when taking off from the ground. Because of this, on many missions, Gumdrop was launched from the wing of a larger aircraft, generally a C-130.
The engine had been specified to keep the aircraft’s infrared signal as small as possible. Indeed, the signature was said to be smaller than a Bic lighter at one hundred yards.
The facets in the body, along with radar-absorbing coating, made its radar profile even smaller. The Air Force officer who had first briefed Mara on the aircraft’s capabilities—a captain with horrible skin and even worse salami-breath—had bragged that it was smaller than a mosquito at three miles.
Mara didn’t care particularly about its radar or infrared profiles, except for the fact that they allowed the aircraft to deliver packages under the most stressed circumstances. She had received several in Malaysia, including one delivered to the top of a burning building surrounded by rebel forces.
By comparison, the drop to the field at Nam Det was child’s play.
Nam Det and the small village where she had taken Kieu appeared to have been abandoned. The house where she’d left the injured pilot was empty, the only evidence that he had been there the missing sheets on the bed.
Mara checked her watch. It was five minutes to two. Gumdrop was supposed to arrive exactly on the hour. Rolling up her skirt and holding it against her thighs, she trotted along the edge of the old runway, taking one last look in the ditch to make sure there was no one there. Then she jogged onto the edge of the field. Unfurling the skirt, she counted off her steps until she found the center; she then walked from there to the end and counted off three long steps before looking up at the sky.
Gumdrop—its official designation was R26A Unmanned Drone/Replenishment Profile, or UMDRP—was already descending overhead, coming down through ten thousand feet in a gradually tightening spiral. As it passed ten thousand feet, its remote pilot, sitting in a bunker in Utah, reoriented his long-range infrared sensors to look for heat sources on the ground. The computer assisting him immediately spotted Mara, informing him that a single subject was standing precisely .012 meters from the target area. The pilot continued scanning the screen, observing the nearby jungle to make sure there was no one else waiting nearby.
The computer spotted Mara’s truck, identifying it as a Chinese version of the venerable ZiL, a Russian design older than not only the pilot, but his father. The pilot had been told about the truck, but though it served as an additional recognition point, the Air Force lieutenant was under orders not to take anything for granted on this mission. So he reached with his right hand to a panel above his flight controls and hit one of the presets on the infrared control screen. This initiated a face-recognition routine that compared the infrared portrait of Mara’s upturned face to images stored in the unit’s library. In Mara’s case, the library was particularly rich; besides the standard reference image prepared by the CIA for all of its paramilitary and field officers, there were two dozen training images and nineteen different “mission references,” the term used to describe images that had been made and stored during previous operations.
Had the pilot cared to, he could have examined the images personally, noting perhaps that while Mara had recently gained a few pounds, her weight was still down significantly from the training period eighteen months ago. But with a long night ahead of him, the pilot followed standard procedure, taking the computer’s word for the final confirmation. He pressed his mike button and told his mission controller that he was on final approach for the drop.
Several thousand miles away in northwestern Vietnam, Mara strained to see the UAV above her. Its black paint and small shape made it hard to pick out in the night sky, and the engine was so quiet that on most drops the first indication that it was overhead was the sound of the parachute deploying.
Tonight, Mara thought she saw a dark shadow sailing overhead. Sure enough, a second later she heard the distinctive fuuu-lumpk as the drop chute opened.
To increase accuracy and reduce the chance of last-minute winds taking the dufflebag-size package off course, the package was dropped close to the ground using a chute that allowed a relatively quick descent. On one of her first missions, Mara had made the mistake of running toward it as it fell and nearly gotten knocked out when it came down on her head. Now she knew better. She tensed, waiting as it sailed a few feet away. Only when she heard the whoosh of air rushing from the landing cushion did she trot forward to retrieve it.
The first thing she did was swap one of the new batteries into her satellite phone. Then she slung the shoulder pistol holster across her chest, situating the military-style Beretta inside. An AK-47 with a folding metal stock sat at the bottom of the case; she took it out, inserted one of the magazines, and made sure it was ready to fire.
Imagine what Sister Jean would have done with that. No boy would ever have made a face behind her back.
Armed, Mara detached the small parachute, rolling and folding it into a small ball. Tucking it under her arm, she zipped up the bag and carried it to the truck. After activating one of the GPS locators—it sent a signal to a satellite the CIA could use to track her—she took the chute out into the jungle looking for a spot to hide it. She was just wedging it beneath a pair of large rocks when the satellite phone rang; it was Lucas.
“You have the package?” he asked.
“Just got it.”
“Why didn’t you check in?”
“God, Peter, I was about to.” She pushed the rocks in place, then rolled over another one. “So, do you have our friend’s location yet?”
“Negative. He’s still an hour or so away from the call-in time. In the meantime, your help is on the way. They should be there inside half an hour. You can head west; we’ll have his exact location and a contact procedure next time you check in.”
“Can I trust these guys, Peter?”
“I trust them.”
“Not the same thing.”
“They’re familiar with Nam Det. They’ve done some work out of there in the past.”
“They parachuting or landing?”
“Mara, these are contract guys. They make their own arrangements,” said Lucas. “As far as I’m concerned, if they can get there by flapping their arms, that’s fine.”
“You don’t know?”
“I would assume they’re coming by plane and landing.”
“You know what ass-ume means, don’t you, Peter?”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes tonight, Mara. Especially old ones.”
“Is that how we’re getting out?”
“Not necessarily. We’ll make arrangements. What’s the situation there? How close are the Chinese?”
“Haven’t seen them.”
“Lao Cai is thirty kilometers away. There are reports that they’re shelling it. The thinking is they may attack over the border there, and push south down the Hong River valley. You should avoid that area.”
“You think?”
Lucas didn’t say anything. Mara imagined him grimacing at
her sarcasm, probably ready with a comeback but not wanting to use it.
“I’ll be okay, Peter. And thanks for the helpers.”
“Yeah, all right. Check back in when they’re on the ground.”
Besides the gun, batteries, and food, Gumdrop’s package included a handheld computer that doubled as a GPS device, night glasses, and extrastrong bug repellent. But in some ways the most valuable thing in the pack was a paper map of the area.
Mara had learned in Malaysia that paper maps had several advantages over the computerized ones she’d grown up with. They didn’t zap batteries, never crashed, and gave you a much better idea of where you were in a single glance. Scrolling through a small GPS screen made it hard to plan a direct route across the Hong using all of the tiny local roads. The topo maps, which were included in Gumdrop’s package, showed she had at most three different choices if she was going to avoid Lao Cai at the north and Pho Rang at the south. The Chinese weren’t the concern at Pho Rang—the city was bound to be used by the Vietnamese as a rallying point because it sat at the intersection of the largest north-south and east-west highways in the region.
After working her alternatives out on the map, she connected the handheld computer to her sat phone and used it to access the latest satellite and surveillance images posted in a secure online space for her by Bangkok. The most recent photo, an infrared shot by a Global Hawk surveillance aircraft, showed a small concentration of Vietnamese vehicles in the mines south of Lao Cai—mobile reinforcements, according to the analysts’ notes. There were troop trucks parked along Route 151 north of Tang Loong, but it looked like she would have clear sailing south. Reaching 279, she could cross the mountains and go north up 32; at that point, she would have to worry about Chinese troops rather than Vietnamese.
Mara’s plan was still somewhat tentative, and would have to remain so until she had a definite location for the scientist. But her basic idea was to get the truck as close to the area as she could, and then hike in on foot to find him. Once she had him, she would cross back over the lines to wherever Lucas arranged the pickup.
