by Larry Bond
“I wouldn’t elevate what you do to the status of flirting,” countered Mara.
“Be kind.” Grease winked at her. “Hang on for a minute, will you? I have to get my caffeine fix.”
Grease ordered an Americano—a shot of espresso in water, so that it had the flavor of a very strong coffee.
“Reminds me of the coffee machine in the Bangkok office,” he said, putting a top on the cup.
“I doubt that,” said Mara.
“How is Bangkok?”
“Still there, last I saw.”
Grease smiled. They walked out into the hall. “You coming in to see Peter?”
“Something like that.”
“I’m working for him,” said Grease. “Come on.”
They walked past the glassed-in courtyard and across to a staircase, taking it down three flights. That was Grease—pushing seventy, with more replacement parts in him than a used car, and he still preferred what he called “the juice of the dance” to being carried.
He told Mara that he had been called back “to take a look at things” in Vietnam and China.
“A lot going on,” he said as they cleared the second landing and headed for the third. “This Cho Lai—he’s some piece of work.”
“The Chinese were desperate for a strong leader,” said Mara.
“They got that in spades,” said Grease. Downstairs, they passed a security point, then entered a part of the building strongly shielded against eavesdropping equipment. Grease buzzed them through a door into a secure hallway with a series of small offices. These were temporary workplaces, where temporary assignees like Grease could hold conversations and work with sensitive material. He paused in front of an office door.
“You left your cell phone upstairs, right?” asked Grease. “No electronics.”
“I know that.”
“Just checking.”
He smiled, punching the combination into the lock.
“I heard somebody blew your cover,” Grease told Mara inside.
“You know who?”
“Obviously it was the Chinese. Question is how long they’ve known.”
Mara had been wondering that herself. It could very well have been back in Malaysia, given all that had gone down there. But there were also problems with the Hanoi station, and Mara strongly suspected a double agent there had passed along the information.
“You think this kills me?” she asked.
“Hell no. You know how many times the Russians figured out who I was? Five or six different incarnations. Nothing stops the Peter Principle,” Grease said. “You’ll rise to your appropriate level of incompetence, I guarantee. You have a long way to go.”
Mara smiled.
“Speaking of Peter,” added Grease. “Before you go up to see him, there’s a company I wanted to ask you about: Maccu Shang Shipping. A Philippine company. Sorry about the cramped space.”
The room was tiny, with a bare desk, a pair of computer terminals, and two steel-and-vinyl chairs. Mara and Grease were sitting almost knee to knee.
“I know Shang,” she told him. “The Philippines is a front. They’re Chinese.”
“You’re positive? The evidence looks a little ambiguous.”
“They’re definitely Chinese.”
“Five ships leased to the company left Macau last night and headed for Zhanjiang. Southern China. Big navy port.”
“See?”
“Turns out some of our friends at the agency that doesn’t exist happened to be tracking an army unit that was just sent there, real fast. Seems like they’re in the port, waiting for something.”
The agency that doesn’t exist was Grease’s quaint way of referring to the NSA, or National Security Agency, which specialized in eavesdropping. His pseudonym came from a popular nickname for the agency, formed from its initials: No Such Agency.
“They’re getting on the ships?” asked Mara.
“Don’t know. I have to check back in. They may be there already. A lot of things to keep tabs on. That one just happened to catch my interest.”
“Shang Shipping brought all sorts of stuff into Malaysia,” said Mara. “A lot of different things.”
“Troops?”
Mara wasn’t sure about that. The Chinese had smuggled some paramilitary and guerillas into the country as advisers, but most of their help to the rebels had been in the form of equipment. The ships had filed manifests that said they were shipping food to Burma—as unlikely an arrangement as Mara had ever heard of.
The Chinese unit’s identity interested Grease—they were commandos, not regular army, and apparently not assigned to the amphibious assault that was to have been launched from Hainan.
“My question is where would they go?” said Grease.
“Could be anywhere,” said Mara. “Vietnam has a long coast.”
“The NSA suggested Hai Phong. Someone attached to the unit apparently gathered some sort of electronic information—I’m guessing that it had to do with a GPS system. But you know them. They won’t admit they know anything.”
“Did they have assault ships?”
“No,” said Grease. “I’m wondering if they might just try sailing into the port.”
“Do the Vietnamese still hold Hai Phong?”
“They do. Were you there?”
“No, we didn’t get that far west.”
Grease asked her a few more questions about the status of things in Vietnam. He commented that the country seemed surprisingly calm for one under siege. Mara wasn’t so sure about that; in her experience, sanity and insanity mixed all the time.
“You going upstairs?” asked Grease, glancing at his watch.
“Yeah.”
“Well, come on. I’ll escort you. We want to get up in time to see your boyfriend testify before the Senate.”
“My boyfriend?”
“Looks like I hit a nerve,” said Grease, opening the door. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that shade of red on you cheeks before.”
“Grease—”
“It does suit you.”
~ * ~
3
The Gulf of Tonkin
Commander Dirk Silas edged his finger along the manual focus ring of his glasses, trying to will something out of the dark night before his ship. The moist air pulled a fog from the ocean, reducing the gear’s effectiveness.
The Chinese were still there, six miles off the port bow. The frigate was the closer of the two; the cruiser’s captain used the smaller boat as a shield and a prod, sending it close, only to have it tuck away. Right now it was doing the latter, sailing into what its captain probably supposed was safe murk beyond Silas’s immediate vision.
Ha!
The communicator on the destroyer captain’s belt buzzed and vibrated with an incoming message. The wireless system allowed Silas to communicate with all departments on his ship without having to be tethered to a physical control panel. He could switch from voice or text messaging by pressing a small button, changing channels and issuing simple commands such as “save” via voice.
In this case, the message referred him to a longer transmission from his fleet commander via video; he retreated to his cabin to view it.
Admiral Roy Meeve’s stone countenance filled the screen. The message had been recorded; it wasn’t live. The admiral’s face seemed almost gray. That wasn’t a function of the video mechanism—if anything it cast it a little more fleshlike.
“Dirk—we’ve confirmed now the Chinese have canceled their plan to ship the landing force from Hainan. Continue your patrol in the area. Maintain a course in international waters. Do not provoke or engage. Do not withdraw.”
Don’t engage, but don’t withdraw? Should I just let the bastards run over me?
Silas flipped the video off with disgust and went to find a cup of coffee.
~ * ~
4
Washington, D.C.
Josh sat in the small room in the Senate office building, running his thumbnails together. The next-
to-last thing in the world he wanted to do was walk from this room into the large conference room next door. He was going to do it, though, because the last thing he wanted to do was let these bastards call him a liar.
The door opened. Josh started to rise, then saw that it was only Jablonski.
“There you are. Ready?” asked the political troubleshooter.
“No.”
“Come on now. You have to have a positive attitude.” Jablonski somehow managed to look disheveled in a bespoke black suit. Maybe it was his purple tie, which despite a perfect knot at the top was a fraction of an inch too long at the bottom. Or perhaps it was the creases in his white shirt, which suggested the pattern of a psychotic snowflake. “You’ll do fine. Senator Grasso loves you. He owes you his life.”
“He owes Mara his life. She’s being smeared, too.”
“We’re not going to mention Mara at the hearing. Okay?”
“Mmmm.”
“How’s the suit? Still fit?”
“It fits.”
Jablonski had had the suit made for him in New York. Josh had worn it for the UN speech; it was still a bit dirty from the attempt on his life before the speech but there’d been no time to have it dry-cleaned.
“Tailor’s father fought with Chiang Kai-shek,” said Jablonski. “Interesting life story. Long struggle.”
The door opened again. One of Grasso’s aides, a young man about Josh’s age, came in. “Ready, Mr. MacArthur.”
“It’s Dr. MacArthur,” said Jablonski.
“Oh, right, I’m sorry.”
“It’s Josh.” He got up and followed the aide into the conference room. It was jammed with aides and seemingly every foreign-interest lobbyist in town. They all wanted to see Josh in person.
Half were undoubtedly spies, Josh thought.
The press was gathered along the far wall of the room. Bulbs flashed and TV lights came on as Josh walked in. He walked stoically to the table opposite the dais and sat down.
Senator Grasso, who chaired the Senate subcommittee on affairs with China—double entendre be damned—sat at the center of the long, courtroomlike platform at the front of the room. He had a grim face—much grimmer than Josh remembered from when they had met in New York. He gave Josh a serious, portentous nod, then leaned back to whisper to one of his aides.
Josh grimaced as a photographer came and took a picture of him. Several more followed. He didn’t even try to smile.
Grasso gaveled the session to order. Or at least attempted to— another senator began speaking immediately, saying something about how he wanted to make sure proper procedure was followed.
“The committee will come to order,” said Grasso, rapping sharply. “These hearings are being conducted to review the President’s request for immediate military aid to be given to Vietnam in light of the gross violation of—”
The senator on Grasso’s left pulled his microphone forward to interrupt. “Mr. Chairman, I have a request—”
“Requests will be handled at the proper time,” said Grasso. “The chair will make the opening statement.”
As seen in television reports, congressional hearings seemed at least somewhat organized, with direction and occasional sparks of order. From Josh’s vantage, this one was three-ring chaos, with the senators talking to aides and correspondents at the back of the room doing brief broadcasts. Josh heard the loud clatter of laptop keys; the session was being live-blogged on at least half a dozen sites.
He was completely ignored for a few minutes as Grasso made a statement about searching for the truth, then corralled the rest of his subcommittee into agreement that they would shut up while he swore Josh in.
“Will the witness rise?” asked Grasso finally.
Josh put his hand on a Bible and swore that he was going to tell the truth.
“Absolutely,” he added.
Jablonski had coached him to read a prepared statement that was essentially an edited version of the one he had given the UN the day before. As he sat down, he took it from his jacket pocket and folded it out on the table in front of him. The cameramen rose, poised to take his picture as he read.
“Dr. MacArthur,” said Senator Grasso. “Do you have a statement you’d like to make?”
“Yes, Senator, I do,” said Josh.
His tongue suddenly stuck in his mouth. He looked down at the pages, filled with words Jablonski had written. They weren’t his. He couldn’t read them.
Everyone waited. The cameras clicked away.
“I... A few days ago, I returned from Vietnam after witnessing a massacre.” Josh pushed the paper to the side. “Innocent people were killed. I testified about it at the UN yesterday morning. I brought back a video. In the hours since, I’ve been called a liar. I’m not a liar. I’m a scientist. I know what I saw. The Chinese are murderers. They killed innocent people. It was despicable. It is despicable.”
There was collective gasp at the word murderers. Jablonski had specifically coached him not to say that. You’re a scientist, he’d said. Be scientific.
But how the hell could you be scientific when you’d seen what he’d seen? And when people called you a liar?
The photographers began taking pictures furiously. Josh looked at Grasso. He had a worried frown on his face.
“Order,” said Grasso, pounding the gavel.
“Mr. Chairman, I must demand that our witness apologize for his intemperate remarks,” said Senator Galveston, who despite his name represented Minnesota. “The Chinese are our allies and our business partners.”
“I don’t see how you can call them our allies,” said the senator on Grasso’s right.
Something between a discussion and pandemonium followed, as the senators argued back and forth about decorum and adjectives. Josh was shocked—not only did one of the senators want him to issue an apology, that seemed to be the majority view on the panel.
Josh knew that standing up to China was unpopular—the President himself had told him that—but he had thought that his speech and the images he’d presented at the UN had shown Americans, if not the world, what was going on.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to call the Chinese murderers. Certainly not every Chinese citizen was in the army, and maybe most wouldn’t support the war. Certainly, they wouldn’t be in favor of killing innocent civilians. But the Chinese government was another story. And their army had definitely done this.
“Mr. Chairman, I ask for a vote of censure on the witness,” said the senator from Minnesota.
“That’s preposterous!” said Grasso. He pounded his gavel.
More discussion. Josh glanced toward the door to the small room where he had left Jablonski. But the door was shut. Most likely the political operative was at the back of the room somewhere, but Josh didn’t want to give the reporters back there the satisfaction of his turning and looking at them.
Grasso finally gaveled his-committee back to order. There would be no demands on the witness, and no further statements from the witness. Instead, he would answer questions posed by the senators.
It was less a Q&A session than an excuse for pontificating. First up was the senator on Grasso’s right, who asked Josh if it was true that he had been near the Chinese border when he witnessed the slaughter, and then after getting a “yes,” launched into a denunciation of China as the enemy of the free world. The senators were on a time limit, as Grasso noted not once but twice before tapping his gavel lightly to cut off a man who was clearly his ally.
Next up was a member of the opposition party, who sat at the far end of the dais. He asked Josh what his qualifications were.
“I’m a biologist,” said Josh. “My specialty is studying the effects—”
“You’re a biologist? I thought you were a climate scientist.”
“Yes. You see, there’s an overlap. In that I study the effects of rapid climate change on biological populations. Now, in Vietnam—”
“So excuse me,” interrupted the senator, in a voice that implied no apology
whatsoever. “You’re not a trained observer? You’re not a medical doctor. You know things about the weather.”
“Of course I’m not a medical doctor.”
“I see,” said the senator, his tone triumphant. “And this tape you brought back—”
“Actually, it was a video stored on—”
