by Larry Bond
“Here,” whispered Josh, stepping up to help lift the door.
“Easy. We don’t want it to roll off.”
“It’ll be better than what we’ve got,” he said, pushing with his back. The trapdoor went up an inch and a half. Mara pulled again and the rope came free. But now the rug had fallen into the crack.
“Hold the door up just a little,” said Mara, pushing at the rug with her fingers.
“Come on.”
“I’m trying.”
“Give it a good push,” said Josh.
Then he sneezed.
Mara managed to flip the rug out of the space. “Down,” she said.
Josh lowered the door into place, sending them into total darkness. Then he sneezed. Though most of the force was muffled by his arm, it was still loud enough to hear.
“This is a very bad time to sneeze,” she said.
“No shit.”
He sneezed again, then moved down the stairs.
The door to the shed crashed open a few seconds later. The soldiers shouted as they came in, screaming “Surrender or die” in Chinese. Then they went silent, apparently scanning the room.
Mara waited, her finger growing stiff as it hovered above the rifle trigger. The silence extended for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, a full minute. Then there was another shout—a brief, sharp command—and the floorboards vibrated as the soldiers fanned out around and across the room.
How close were they? Directly above?
She could kill the first one, and the second. If she was lucky, she could grab a weapon.
Still, they’d be overcome eventually. It would probably be more prudent to surrender.
That would just be another way to die. Better to have some say in it.
A heavy heel set down a few feet away, pushing the floor with a squeak. It pounded twice, tapping maybe to see if there was a hollow sound.
Now, thought Mara, getting ready.
The heels moved away. Mara couldn’t believe it—she thought for sure it was a trick of her hearing, her brain unconsciously guilty of wishful thinking.
There was more talk, muffled, indecipherable. And footsteps toward the door.
They’d missed them.
They’d missed them!
Josh felt as if he were suffocating. He had his nose buried deep in the crook of his arm. He held his breath and bit his lip, doing everything imaginable to stifle his sneeze. But the urge overwhelmed him. He pushed farther into the darkness, past M, hunkering against a crate and the wall and bowing down just as he lost the struggle.
His entire body shuddered with the sneeze. He sneezed again and again, curling his head as far down into his midsection as he could, pressing his arm against his face.
If the door opened now, he’d run up, he’d throw himself at them, he’d do everything he could to try and save the others.
He held his breath again, wiping his nose with his sleeve. He sniffled lightly. As quickly as it had come on, the fit was over.
M brushed up against him, then curled herself around his side.
He held her for what seemed like a long while, then got up and went toward the front, looking for Mara.
“Ssshh,” she whispered. “I think they left.”
“How will we know it’s safe to go out?” he asked.
“We won’t. We’ll just have to wait as long as we can.”
“Yes,” he started to say, but his nose suddenly began to tickle. He buried his face in his arm a second before sneezing again.
“Are you okay?” Mara asked.
“Smoke,” he said as another sneeze erupted. “I smell smoke.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—they’re setting the building on fire!”
13
Hanoi
When General Perry offered to let Zeus scout the reservoir, Zeus accepted, not so much because he wanted to get a better understanding of the tactical situation, but because he knew offers from generals were basically orders. In truth, though, Zeus didn’t particularly like planes, especially the small ones typically used for scouting missions. He couldn’t stand helicopters, either. He felt like one good burst of wind or small-arms fire would take them down.
Larger aircraft didn’t bother him, even when he had to jump out of them. Of course, he had closed his eyes on his very first jump, and on every one since. But frankly, he felt a hell of a lot safer under a parachute than in the cockpit of a Blackhawk or, God forbid, a Little Bird.
Of course, as bad as they were, at least they flew relatively slowly. A Navy buddy had once arranged a demonstration flight in an F/A-18 when Zeus was in Special Forces. The idea was to educate the soldier on what pilots did when called in on a ground support mission.
The only education Zeus got had to do with the futility of trying to control certain involuntary bodily movements and reactions, none of them pleasant.
He couldn’t imagine what sort of aircraft the Vietnamese air force would be flying at this point. Probably one of those open-cockpit biplanes.
He braced himself as he was driven to the airport. Civilian traffic was now practically nonexistent, and the road was empty though it was the middle of the day. Some of the fires Zeus had seen on the way into the city were still burning.
The driver worked hard trying to keep the jeep—an old American vehicle—from falling into the worst of the craters on the access road to the military hangar area. Zeus’s teeth rattled as they careened back and forth across the road, the driver occasionally pushing the jeep into the pockmarked infield in an effort to find a smooth path.
A two-engined Russian transport sat at the far end of the apron area, being fueled. It was an An-26 Curl, a member of the turboprop family sometimes compared to the C-130 Hercules. Josh consoled himself with the thought that he could have done much worse as the jeep barreled toward the aircraft. He gripped the side of the dashboard, expecting the driver would slam on the brakes any second. But the jeep only picked up speed, until it looked for all the world that they were going to crash into the plane. At the last possible second, he turned the wheel and hit the brakes. The jeep screeched to a stop a few feet from the plane—and maybe inches from the fuel truck next to it.
“Great. Thanks,” said Zeus, pulling himself out of the vehicle as quickly as he could. Feet shaking, he grabbed his ruck—he had a sweater and a pair of binoculars as well as several maps—and started toward the plane.
The driver began yelling at him in Vietnamese.
“What?” asked Zeus, gesturing.
The man pointed to the right, beyond the oil truck.
“Isn’t this the plane?”
The driver signaled that he had to go farther—around the side of the building.
Zeus turned the corner. An old Cessna sat near the hangar.
It didn’t look like it could possibly fly, especially since the rear quarter of the plane was covered with a tarp. Zeus walked over and put his hand on the wing strut.
Was it his imagination, or did the strut give way as he pulled back and forth?
“Lieutenant Murphy?”
Zeus turned to find a man dressed in a pilot’s jumper grinning at him.
“I’m Murphy.”
“I’m Captain Thieu,” said the man, removing one of his hands from his hips to shake. The accent made his English hard to understand. “Headquarters told me you were on your way. You’re a little late.”
“Sorry.”
“We’re just about ready to take off. I will give you an orientation brief in the hangar. Then we will fly.”
“Okay.”
“Nice old plane, eh?” said Thieu, coming over and rapping his knuckles on the Cessna’s nose. “Old Bird Dog.”
“Yup. It’s nice.”
“It was American,” said the pilot approvingly. “You like these?”
“Uh …”
“Very good plane.”
“I’m sure. Do I get to wear a parachute?”
“Yes, of course.”
At least that was somet
hing.
“If we’re tight on time, why don’t we just take off right now,” said Zeus. “You can brief me while we’re in the plane.”
“It will be easier on the ground,” said Thieu. “I have to take a last-minute look at the weather and the other intelligence.”
“All right. What about that tarp?”
Thieu gave him a puzzled look. “What about it?”
“When do you take it off?”
“Oh no, no, no, Lieutenant. We are not taking that plane.”
“Thank God.”
“We’re flying the Albatros. You see?” Thieu pointed across the concrete parking area toward a fighter jet that looked nearly as small as the Cessna. “We’ll go in and out, very fast. Nothing to fear.”
Twenty minutes later, Zeus was wishing he hadn’t eaten such a big breakfast that morning.
Or any other meal for the past year.
Gravity squeezed him against the rear seat of the Aero L-39C as Thieu rocketed the plane off the runway, pushing the nose up nearly ninety degrees and then twisting onto the proper flight path.
The L-39C was a Czech-built aircraft, intended primarily as a trainer, though used by some Third World countries as a lightweight attack aircraft. Its single engine—there were scoops on either side of the cockpit, but only one power plant—could take it about 755 kilometers an hour, or 408 knots, not supersonic but not standing still either. When it came from the factory, the Albatros did not carry a machine gun or provisions for other weapons; however, the Vietnamese had added a 23mm twin-barrel cannon to its underside, giving it a limited attack capacity.
“Lieutenant, are you with us?” Thieu asked as they cleared through five thousand meters, roughly fifteen thousand feet.
“I’m here.”
“We will be over the reservoir in ten minutes.”
Zeus checked his watch. The Tomahawk missiles traveled at roughly 550 knots; the ships they were aboard were about 220 miles away. Once Zeus gave the okay for them to launch, it would take nearly a half hour for them to arrive. Zeus and Thieu would be circling the whole time.
Loads of fun.
Zeus closed his eyes, willing his stomach to behave as they flew. After a couple of deep breaths, he opened them again and forced himself to look outside the cockpit toward the ground.
The fields below were divided into long rectangles intersected by irrigation ditches. Houses clustered on the high spots, a few hundred or so gathered around the roads. They looked like little metal toys, their steel roofs glittering in the afternoon sun.
The clouds thickened, obscuring much of his view. When they cleared, he saw a large body of water and thought they were over the reservoir, but it was just the Hung River. They still had a good distance to go.
“You like flying?” asked Thieu over the interphone or internal radio.
“Not particularly.”
The pilot laughed. “I love it,” said Thieu. “I learned when I was sixteen. So today I have been flying for half my life. Today is my birthday. Much luck today.”
“That’s good,” said Zeus, struggling to sound enthusiastic. “Happy birthday.”
“Look at the mountains. Very pretty. No?”
They looked like green wrinkles in the earth.
Green wrinkles of …
Zeus took his maps from the leg pocket of his flight suit and unfolded them, trying to correlate what he saw with the ground below. The Tomahawks had three targets: the hydro plant and dam at Hoa Binh, the dam at Suvui, and the bridge below the dam where Route 6 ran south and connected to Route 15.
The Suvui dam was the most important target. Only a few months old, it had been built with the help of the World Bank, which received a good bit of funding from America. Now American taxpayers were going to spend a few million dollars destroying it.
Zeus’s first job was to make sure that the villages along the southern end of the lake had been evacuated. At twenty thousand feet, he could barely make out the houses, let alone tell whether they were empty.
“We need to go down,” he told the pilot when they came over Song Da. “Way down.”
“Oh yes. We go down.”
The aircraft’s right wing rolled and the Albatros began plummeting toward the ground. Murphy’s nausea returned. He clamped his mouth shut beneath the oxygen mask, holding tight as the pilot pushed the aircraft through ten thousand feet. Thieu rolled the plane onto its back, then through an invert, before pushing into a somewhat shallower dive.
Zeus managed to open his eyes. The reservoir’s turquoise blue spread before him. “I need to see the houses on the south side,” he said.
“Oh yes. That’s where we are going,” said Thieu.
Zeus took out the binoculars and began scanning the bank of the reservoir as the plane continued to glide downward. They began slowing down as well, the airspeed dropping through three hundred knots until it seemed as if they were standing still.
He could see a hut, and what looked like it might be a boat, but little else. He followed the road for a while but saw nothing on it.
“Can you get lower?” Zeus asked.
“Next pass,” said Thieu, banking the plane.
They crisscrossed along the southern border of the reservoir three more times, finally getting down to within about five hundred feet. Thieu kept cutting their speed, but paradoxically, the lower they got, the faster they seemed to be flying.
Were the villages empty?
He thought they were. Certainly no one was moving around down there.
As they reached the western end of the reservoir, Zeus saw a reflection of light near the bridge. He asked Thieu to go down and check it. They came back around low and slow, barely at a hundred knots.
It was a Vietnamese troop truck, one of the units that had been charged with getting the villagers out of the area. Three soldiers waved as they plane passed overhead.
“We have to get them off the bridge,” said Zeus. “And then I need to talk to my general.”
14
Northwestern Vietnam
Mara felt Josh grab her arm.
“They’re trying to burn us out,” he told her. “I saw them do it earlier. They wait and shoot when we come out.”
“I know.”
“You think we have enough air down here?”
“The fire might suck it out.”
“Yeah. But if we run out, they’ll kill us anyway.”
It was a hell of a choice, Mara thought—death by suffocation or by bullet.
Josh moved away, back into the cellar. “M, where are you?”
Which was better? she wondered. Lie down in the hole and maybe die? Or face certain death trying to leave the building?
Better to stay. They’d have at least something of a chance.
And yet, everything inside her was pushing for her to run up the steps, get out, and kill the bastards who had done this.
Josh came back, poking her in the ribs as he searched for the wall and the steps.
“Where are you going?” Mara asked.
“I had an idea,” he said. “You stay with M. I’ll run out and surrender. They won’t realize you’re here.”
“That’ll never work. They’ll search the place for sure then. We’ll all die. It’s noble of you—but no. It’ll do the opposite of what you want.”
“I can’t stay here and suffocate to death. No way.”
“That may not happen. We may have enough oxygen.”
“You think we should take the chance?”
“It’s a better chance than certain death.”
Josh started away. Mara grabbed his shirt.
“You told me what they did,” she said. “They’re waiting out there for us now.”
“Maybe if we both go out,” he said, “they won’t think of the girl.”
“They’ll find her and kill her. You saved her once.”
Mara waited for him to speak. She could hear noises above them—it sounded like more helicopters.
Was it really h
opeless?
“I don’t know what to do,” said Josh finally.
“Neither do I.”
She reached forward and touched his arm. He pressed into her.
“All my life, I’ve known what to do,” he told her. “I’ve survived.”
“I don’t know what to do either,” she said. “But I think we stay.”
Jing Yo trotted disgustedly toward the helicopters. Colonel Sun must be right. The scientist must be somewhere back in the jungle, holed up under some bush.
Very possibly dead.
Hopefully not. An infrared searching device was on its way; they’d have an easier time finding him if he was still alive.
Either way, he’d get him.
“Let’s go,” Jing Yo told the army captain. His men were already heading for the helicopters.
“You’re going to just let the fires burn?” asked Sergeant Wu. “What if they spread?”
Jing Yo turned back. Black smoke billowed from the biggest barn; flames were poking from the others. Most of the houses were already destroyed.
“We’ll have the helicopters fly over them. The downdraft will beat the flames down,” he said, climbing into the chopper.
Josh slid down against the stack of boxes, holding M with his right arm and leaning against Mara on his left. Trusting himself to fate was something he’d never been able to do. Completely letting go—it was impossible.
This was a time he should be praying, but it had always seemed the coward’s way, or a cop-out. Turning yourself over to God, or at least the unknown.
That was what he liked about science. You could measure the odds of something happening, the probability of a specific weather pattern and how it would intersect with the ecosystem, and you could measure the parameters of your guess. You could look at the possibilities and your models, and decide what to do.
Not that it guaranteed success. There were always a lot of variables. The climate crisis proved that. The outliers on the graph—the possibilities everyone had rejected—had proved to be the accurate predictors.
“Are you still conscious?” Mara whispered.
