by Larry Bond
Or almost round. The scooter pulled to the right once they were on the highway. But it was far better than walking, and even at forty miles an hour, Jing Yo found he could hold it steady with relatively little pressure.
They drove for roughly another hour, still on the Ho Chi Minh Highway. Nearing Thai Hoa, Jing Yo got off to use local roads. He ran into a pair of roadblocks almost immediately. At the first, a bored Vietnamese sergeant barely looked at their papers before waving them away. The soldiers manning the second, however, told them that the curfew was being strictly enforced. They threatened to put them in jail until Hyuen Bo began to sob. They relented, but insisted the pair find a place to stay until dawn, warning that other patrols would be stricter, and that sooner or later they would be arrested.
Jing Yo was wondering whether to take this advice to heart when he heard a high-pitched whistle in the distance.
He reached his hand to his chest where Hyuen Bo’s were, grasping them and squeezing. In the next moment, there was a low crash, the sound thunder makes when lightning splits trees ten or twelve miles away.
White light flashed in the distance ahead. The flashes looked like signals sent from a ship in the distance, whiteness streaming through shutters opening and closing.
The sound of the explosions followed.
And then, finally, air-raid sirens began to sound. Antiaircraft weapons began spewing streams of tracers into the air. The ground shook with a dozen different vibrations, and the air popped with rounds as they were expelled. Searchlights began to sweep the clouds. Jing Yo heard jets in the distance.
He angled back toward the highway. It took several minutes to find it. Just before he did, he heard the whistle of bombs falling toward him.
Or thought he did. Jing Yo reasoned later that if he had truly heard the bombs, he would have been blown up by their explosions. And he was not blown up, merely covered with dust and severely rattled. The ground heaved violently and he nearly went over, but with all of the other sounds and chaos, it was impossible to say if the concussions were nearby or not.
Hyuen Bo tightened her hold on his chest.
“Hang on,” he said, squeezing the throttle. “We must get as far south as we can while the attack continues.”
~ * ~
19
Near Thai Hoa, Vietnam
Mara had just crossed out of the city’s precincts when DeBiase called and warned her that an attack was on the way. She drove to a high spot south of the city, then pulled over and got the others out of the vehicles, fearing that the approaching Chinese aircraft would mistake them for soldiers.
The air strikes began with a fury of explosions, half a dozen cruise missiles striking ahead of the airplanes. At first, the Chinese seemed to be aiming at a Vietnamese division headquarters, which was located along the Ho Chi Minh Highway south of the city. But within minutes, unguided bombs were falling in a broad semicircle that took in the residential areas of the city. Some missiles in a third wave even fell on nonmilitary targets, striking the buildings on the eastern side of the highway and flattening the business area beneath a tremendous red and black mushroom cloud.
“Caught a gasoline tank,” said Kerfer. “The Chinese aren’t pulling many punches.”
“I wouldn’t expect them to,” said Mara.
“You know them well?”
“I fought against their commandos in Malaysia. They’re bastards.”
Kerfer remained silent. Maybe, she thought, that was his way of apologizing for having underestimated her.
Probably not. He wasn’t the sort that apologized for anything, not even subtly.
“Now’s the best time to drive,” said Kerfer as the planes flew off. “Everybody’ll be hunkered down.”
“They’ll be nervous, too.”
“They’re always nervous.”
Mara watched for a few more seconds. Fires burned in the distance, the fingers of a man buried alive groping from the grave.
“I wish to hell you hadn’t shot up that train car,” Mara told Kerfer.
“If I hadn’t we’d be dead by now,” he told her, walking back to the car.
~ * ~
Mara let Squeaky drive as they pressed south. The patrols seemed almost nonexistent. DeBiase was cagey in his updates, not giving her exact information about what was going on. That made sense, of course: if she was captured, anything he told her would have to be considered forfeit to the Chinese. Knowing what the Americans knew and when they knew it would tell them quite a bit about the intelligence-gathering methods.
Josh was still sleeping in the middle seat of the truck next to her. He began mumbling to himself incoherently, humming almost, his teeth held close together.
Bad dream, probably. Maybe based on what he had seen behind the lines.
He’d told her very little of it. An entire village buried in a field. An arm poking up from the ground after the rain. His fellow scientists, murdered in their sleep. The body of child who’d crawled under a bed to hide after being wounded, then left there to die, its toy doll in its arms.
The sat phone rang. DeBiase with another update.
“Hey, darling, how are you?”
“I’m doing good, Million Dollar Man,” Mara answered. “How’s your hernia?”
“Ailing me greatly. You’re not making very good time.”
“We’re driving through a country that has a war on,” said Mara. “I didn’t know you had your stopwatch out.”
“Listen, the Chinese navy is gathering off the coast, south of Hainan Island. There’s big trouble brewing.”
“You told me that already.”
“This is big trouble. It looks like they have an invasion force getting ready.”
“When?”
“Can’t tell. But we want you home. Come on now,” he said, switching to his cheerleader voice. “Pick up your pace. Once you get below Hue, you’ll have free sailing. I have a plane lined up for you in Saigon.”
“There has to be an airstrip closer that we can get to,” Mara told him. “Come on.”
“Darlin’, I’ve been trying. But the best alternative I can do to Ho Chi Minh is a puddle jumper that can meet you near Cambodia. That’ll be twice as dangerous. The Chinese have complete air superiority, as you just saw.”
“And the pilot’s a drunk, right?”
“Could well be.”
It was an inside joke between them, a reference to a story DeBiase liked to tell of one of his own hairy escapes by plane, when the pilot had been so smashed that DeBiase had taken over the controls mid-flight. DeBiase, of course, had no clue what he was doing and just barely succeeded in keeping the plane moving in the right direction. Miraculously, the real pilot revived about ten minutes from the airfield where they were supposed to touch down, and landed the plane without a hitch. The story was probably largely apocryphal, like many a DeBiase tale, but it was told with such gusto that it deserved to be entirely true.
“If you start to get into trouble south of Hue,” added DeBiase, “we’ll consider asking the Vietnamese for help. The closer we are to Saigon, the harder it should be for the Chinese to interfere.”
“I don’t think asking the Vietnamese for help at this point is a good idea,” said Mara.
“Why not?”
“There have to be more spies in Saigon than in Hanoi,” she said.
“I’m sure there are. What else is up?” asked DeBiase. His voice had a subtle edge to it.
“We had some trouble on the train,” said Mara, deciding to come clean. “With the Vietnamese.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The kind that got them killed.”
“That sounds like bad trouble,” said DeBiase.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen good trouble.”
“Well.” He paused. She knew he was considering whether to ask what had happened. “To make an omelet, eggs are often broken.”
“They are.”
“We won’t talk to the Vietnamese at all,” he sa
id.
“Good.”
“But you get going. Things are falling apart there damn fast.”
~ * ~
20
Washington, D.C.
The thing that really frosted Greene was the fact that all of the senators he’d invited to lunch in the White House dining room were members of his own party. All had stood onstage with him this past November and proclaimed their undying support. They’d been the first on their feet in January to applaud at the inauguration.
And the first with their hands out the next day.
He didn’t have one vote among them to give aid to Vietnam. Maybe he had Leiber. Maybe. But even the Connecticut senator looked like he was a little beaten down. He sat at the far end of the table near the windows and the painting of Geronimo that Greene liked, hunched over a bowl of soup. He’d said less than two words the entire time.
“So obviously we’re here for a reason, Mr. President,” said Phillip Grasso, whom Greene had seated at his right hand. “You’re going to push us on China.”
“Damn right I’m going to push you on China,” said Greene.
“They’re taking over the world again, right?” Grasso turned and winked at the other senators.
“I wouldn’t underestimate their threat,” said Greene.
“I take China very seriously,” said Grasso. “I just don’t think we should go to war with them.”
“If we don’t stand up to them now, we will be at war with them eventually,” Greene told him. “That’s why I want to help Vietnam.”
“We can’t send arms,” said Senator Roosevelt, who despite his last name was not related to either president, either through blood or character. “People will view it as a hostile act.”
“And invading Vietnam was not?” said Greene in disbelief.
Everyone looked at their plates. Greene took a breath and tried to recalibrate.
“I think a good step here,” said Leiber, “would be to go to the UN and get sanctions. We can build a coalition. Like George Bush did during the first Gulf War. The first George Bush,” he added.
“No one takes the UN seriously,” said Grasso. “Besides, you don’t have the votes there. Frankly, I think I’d oppose sanctions myself. China is our biggest trading partner.”
Grasso headed the Armed Services Committee. If he wasn’t taking a hard stand against China, no one on his committee would. Not a single one.
Grasso was a guy who could tell which way popular opinion was running. He’d started out as a machinist in a small family-owned business, a “real blue-collar guy,” as the talking heads put it. He’d wandered into politics because the state wanted to take his backyard to expand a highway. He ended up on the town board, became a county party chairman, then a congressman and a real power in New York. He had numerous connections on both sides of the political aisle. And a long, long list of contributors.
Many of whom undoubtedly had Chinese connections.
Greene needed to persuade him.
“I am for sanctions,” said the president. “I’m going to push them personally in front of the UN. We’re raising a stink.”
“Why raise a stink when the Vietnamese started it?” asked Senator Jennifer Kraft. Kraft was the junior senator from Wisconsin, and until now, a vote Greene could generally count on.
“Maybe they didn’t start the war,” said Greene. “What would your reaction be then?”
“I’d need some very good proof that they didn’t.”
“We’ve seen footage from the Chinese,” said Grasso. “We’ve seen their satellite photos. Is there proof they’re lying?”
“If I have proof, that would change your mind?” asked Greene.
“I would consider it,” fudged Grasso. “Do you have proof?”
Greene did have proof—Josh MacArthur, and the little orphan girl he’d found. But he wasn’t ready to share that proof with anyone outside the administration. Even there, most didn’t know about it. The problem was that once he said something, especially here, it would get out, and the Chinese would find a way to rebut it.
“We’re examining the situation,” Greene said.
“What’s ‘examining’ mean?” asked Kraft.
“Reviewing the intelligence. Let’s say we have proof—what then?”
“Convince the UN. Start with sanctions,” suggested Kraft. “Then you might be able to get some votes.”
You might get some votes—not we. Greene boiled inside. He had very little use for the UN. No use, in fact.
Yet he couldn’t go to war without the support of the American people. And their elected representatives.
“I am going to the UN,” he said. “You can count on that.” He looked around the table. “Could someone pass me the pepper? My chicken is a little bland.”
~ * ~
21
Vinh Province, Vietnam
Jing Yo stopped again to siphon gas, this time from a small farm not far from the road. Hyuen Bo had fallen asleep against his back, and nearly fell off when he stopped. Jing Yo left her with the scooter near the road and went alone to scout the yard.
A few years before, this would have been a rich farm for Vietnam, with several acres and several buildings. Now it was commonplace. He guessed that it would have a tractor and at least one car or motorbike, but he couldn’t find them. There were two sheds near the road. Neither had a vehicle. In one, he found a small fuel can, but it smelled of diesel or kerosene, and its fuel was too thick to be gasoline.
Jing Yo found a path that led back to the two small houses. It started to rain as he approached the nearer house. The small droplets felt good at first, but soon they started to fall faster and thicker, and it became harder to see.
A tractor was parked in a hollow next to the house. A motorcycle leaned against it. Jing Yo unscrewed the top to the motorcycle’s gas tank. There was gas almost to the brim. He pushed his hose in to fill his makeshift gas tank, then got another idea. He picked up the bike and backed it away from the house, walking with it to the spot where he’d left Hyuen Bo.
He didn’t see her or the scooter. A hole opened in his chest as he stood still, turning around slowly as he looked for her.
Perhaps it is good that she has left, he thought.
“I’m here,” she whispered. And his heart jumped.
“Across the road,” Hyuen Bo added. “I was afraid we could be seen.”
She pushed the bike out from around the brush where she’d been hiding.
“You found another bike?”
“Just for the gas,” said Jing Yo, changing his mind about taking it.
He didn’t want to be separated from her.
Not yet.
They rigged the hose, taking advantage of the different heights between the machines. The slope and the full tank of gas in the bike made it easy.
“Are you hungry?” Jing Yo asked when they finished.
“Why? Is there food?”
“There are houses. There’s bound to be something.”
“You shouldn’t take the food from the people,” said Hyuen Bo. “They probably have very little.”
“It’s a rich farm,” said Jing Yo. “A person with a farm this size would be very well off in China. If not for the drought.”
“Is that how you justify stealing?”
Jing Yo didn’t answer. He took the bike and pushed it back to its resting spot. He leaned it against the tractor just as the sat phone rang.
“We have found a transmission on the frequencies used by the CIA,” said a man whose voice he did not recognize. “There have been three transmissions in the past several hours, moving in a general direction south. The last was fifteen minutes ago, in southern Vinh Province. There have been no other transmissions from the American spies in the past two days.”
“Give me directions,” said Jing Yo.
~ * ~
The last signal had come from, a position barely thirty kilometers, or twenty miles, away. Jing Yo drove with new focus. It might be noth
ing—there was no way of knowing from the signal itself, and his informer had made no promises—but he was convinced that he was now on his quarry’s trail. And close to him.
Rain continued to fall steadily. The scooter’s small wheels slipped on the pavement, and he had to keep his speed down to roughly forty kilometers an hour. It was an exercise in patience.
