by Larry Bond
None of those memories would stick today, not even the wild flights of fantasy concerning relatives who might have ridden out their horses or gone hunting in the woods when Indians were still a possibility. Josh wandered as aimlessly in his thoughts as he did on the ground, heading eventually into the woods. Tex had left at dawn to catch his plane, and he felt oddly alone, even with his family nearby.
The woods were thinner than he remembered, with big gaps on the field side. They ran about fifty yards deep, but nearly a mile wide, extending into two neighboring properties.
This would be a great place to take Mara, thought Josh.
He turned his attention to the trees, then to the base of the trees. He saw a mushroom — Exidia glandulosa, a black, jelly fungus — clinging to some downed branches and bits of bark at the base of the tree. Though common in North America, he couldn’t remember seeing examples here. The fungus family thrived on warmer, wet temperatures.
You might make an argument that this instance of Exidia glandulosa was a product of the rapid climate change over the past few years. Then again, the mushroom was common elsewhere, and the fact that Josh couldn’t remember seeing it here wouldn’t be taken as scientific evidence of anything — except a possibly faulty memory.
You had to be careful with science. Especially something as tricky as climate change. People always wanted to blame the weather. They always looked for the simple argument, the equation built only from prime numbers. Yet complexity was much more often the reality.
Something cracked to his right. Josh spun in the direction, tense. For a moment he was back in Vietnam, trying to escape — alone with M, the little girl, desperate to keep her safe.
Thank God for her. Taking care of her had kept him from panicking. Caring for someone else was the key to his own survival.
But he wasn’t in Vietnam; he was in Ohio. A squirrel shot out to his left, ducking into some crinkled leaves.
God, I miss Mara, Josh thought to himself. Maybe I’ll try calling her again from the house.
* * *
Jing Yo watched the scientist walk past him. He considered leaping out — it would be nothing to grab his neck and snap it.
But assassination was not something accomplished by impulse. It required patience and planning. The only thing he had aimed at doing today was scouting the area — he’d left the rifle back at the motel.
He had his hands and his knife. It would be easy.
Snatch the opportunity.
Was his way to escape clear? He had left the car where it could be easily seen, and had not yet had a chance to check the local roads, or thought of where he would go after he killed.
Jing Yo hesitated, and with that hesitation, whatever chance he had slipped away — someone near the house called to the scientist, and stood watching him as he emerged from the woods.
Patience was the key. There was no rush to take him. Jing Yo would plan the operation correctly, then wait.
29
Washington, D.C.
President Greene was alone in the Oval Office, waiting to receive a delegation of businessmen from Missouri, when Frost called with an update on the Vietnam situation.
“I have exactly sixty seconds for you,” the president told him. “Go.”
“We pinned down the information on the dirty bombs. The Vietnamese have a delivery system — Scud missiles with extended range. From North Korea. They could hit Hong Kong.”
“That far?”
“Absolutely. I have no information on the actual targeting data, but they could have as many as twelve weapons. The Chinese would be defenseless against them.”
“Hold on,” Greene told Frost. He pushed the hold button on his phone, then slapped the button to connect to his appointments secretary. “Joyce—”
“They’re on their way, sir.”
“Damn.”
“Should I call them back?”
“No, no,” said Greene. He slapped the phone button and reconnected with Frost. “You’re one hundred percent sure?”
“Nothing is one hundred percent.”
“Do you have specific locations on the missiles?”
“No, sir — I have a dozen possibilities.”
“You need to narrow that down.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Prepare a report for the NSC. We’ll talk—”
There was a knock on the door.
“Mr. President, there was one other thing — the Chinese are launching a tank attack on a new front. They need antitank weapons.”
“Didn’t we just give them a shipment?”
“They’ve used those. We have Javelins that we can get from India, so it won’t be clear that we helped get them there. But the problem is—”
“Will this buy us time?” asked Greene. As Frost hesitated, he put the question more succinctly. “Will this make the Vietnamese less likely to use their dirty bombs?”
“It’s likely to slow if not stop the advance. But it would, yes, give us more time to get the exact locations of their weapons. As I said—”
“What exactly do you need? Bottom line?”
“Help from the Air Force. They have an MC-17 and could fly into Vietnam. If—”
“What are the odds of the Chinese stopping the plane?”
“Well, the MC-17 is designed for this sort of thing, but if you’re looking for a guarantee then—”
“Get the Javelins there as soon as possible,” said Greene, starting to hang up.
“One last thing.”
“Peter, the next time you tell me you have only one thing you want to mention, please mean it.”
“The cyber project has stalled. The technical people say they need a physical node to get into the Chinese system. Until they have that, there’s no guarantee we can stop anything they do. We can only react.”
“In English?”
“They need one of their workstations. I was thinking that we could solve the problem.”
Greene listened as Frost outlined the plan.
“The payoff is immense. And even if that element fails—”
“Put it in play,” said Greene. He hung up the phone just as his aide stuck his head in the door, the businessmen crowding behind him.
30
Near the Chinese-Vietnam border
Zeus hunched over the laptop, calculating the progress of the armored group approaching Malipo. They were moving quickly. Too fast — they were going to get to the Y in the highway before he could turn around to block the road.
If he couldn’t send the tanks down the other road, they’d miss the highway where Trung was arranging the ambush. Trung’s entire plan would be worthless.
No Tomahawks. He’d calculated earlier that it would take three, though he’d want six to play it safe. It was an easier strike than the dams, but the location was more important.
A thousand pounds of explosive, times three.
Actually, you didn’t need anywhere near that much — the goal was just to start an avalanche, and the Tomahawks were the weapon he’d thought of. They were overkill, really. If you placed the explosive perfectly, you could use less, a lot less. More than a hand grenade, but less than a five-hundred-pound bomb.
All you needed was enough to start an avalanche.
He could do it with explosives, as Trung had suggested.
* * *
“I need to find Major Chaū,” Zeus told the orderly. “I need his help arranging something.”
“Major Chaū has returned to Hanoi.”
“What? Why?”
The orderly’s command of English quickly disappeared. Frustrated, Zeus walked a few yards away, then took one of his sat phones out and tried calling Chaū, but there was no answer.
Zeus was just putting away the phone when a thin infantry officer approached. Speaking with an Australian-English accent, he introduced himself as Colonel Dai.
“General Trung asked that I assist you,” said Dai. “The orderly said that you were looking for Major
Chaū.”
“Where is he?”
“He has gone back to Hanoi on assignment. Do you require a transport there?”
“No.” Zeus wasn’t sure what to make of his translator’s disappearance. Certainly, Chaū might have many things to do. But he couldn’t help wonder if he was being punished for helping Zeus find Anna.
Or was that just paranoia? How much could he trust the Vietnamese? Or Trung — it was Trung, really, whom he had to trust. He had no way of knowing. He had to just guess, just move ahead blindly.
“I need a lot of explosives,” Zeus told the colonel. “For General Trung’s plans — I can’t get the missiles I wanted, so I’m going to have to substitute explosives. I’m going to need them, and a way of getting them up there.”
“Up to where?”
“Above Malipo in China.”
* * *
Colonel Dai was as good as his word, finding him explosives, a truck, and two men to help. The men were explosives experts drawn from civilian life rather than professional soldiers, but this was an asset — one had worked on highways, clearing passes, and seemed confident of the solution when Zeus showed him the problem. The other had worked in mines, and recommended a much smaller amount of explosives than Zeus had requested.
Though heartened by the estimate, Zeus stuck with his request.
Both of them called themselves Joe, which was somewhat confusing. More seriously, neither man spoke English, and Dai couldn’t find anyone else in his unit who did. The driver knew a few words, but they had mostly to do with curses and drinks.
“I am Liu,” he told Zeus, shaking his hand profusely. “We go now?”
“Where’s your vehicle?”
The man pointed to a Chinese-made BJ-212, essentially a Jeep knockoff with an extended rear cargo area. There were small gun mounts on the side, but no guns.
Fortunately, there were plenty of explosives, along with electronic blast detonators, wires, and a pair of control boxes. They packed them quickly — Zeus gingerly, the others with the practiced indifference of men long inured to the trade — and set off.
31
Hanoi
Harland Perry glanced at his wristwatch, mentally calculating the time difference between Hanoi and California. He didn’t want to wake James.
That wasn’t true at all. James wouldn’t mind being woken for this. No reporter would — it was the biggest story of the year, perhaps decade:
The United States was supplying material aid to the Vietnamese. Not just intelligence, but weapons and advisors. It had already lost one soldier, and come damn close to losing another. And its men had killed Chinese.
He toyed with the phone. He’d known James for a long time — he’d gone to college with his son, and the three had gone hunting together at least once a year for the past decade. He could trust him to keep his identity secret—“a Deep Throat source.”
But …
Was he simply mad because Zeus had gone over his head? Was he somehow trying to make up for Win Christian, whom he had sent to his death?
Or was he trying to do the right thing? What was he out to accomplish?
Save the lives of countless Americans. Avoid a costly, impossible-to-win war with China.
Or was he really out to screw the president, his friend?
The scandal would undoubtedly bring Greene down. Congress was already trying to impeach him; this would be the last nail in the coffin.
Where was his responsibility?
To his oath as an officer, surely. And from that oath, to his country. He owed the country his opinion — the Constitution was being dangerously skirted. Even if the actions Zeus Murphy had undertaken fell short of the legal definition of war, Perry was convinced that Greene would soon go over the line.
Where was the line? A dozen troops, two dozen — a division? Greene might be on the right side of the line at the moment, but his actions could easily provoke China into a foolish act, which would then bring the U.S. into the war, one that surely couldn’t be won.
But Perry’s oath also meant that he answered to his superiors, and ultimately to the president — directly in this case. Was it right to pit his judgment against Greene’s?
He certainly had a responsibility to tell Greene what he thought of remaining in Vietnam. He had discharged that responsibility. It was the larger question that remained.
What if one of Kennedy’s advisors, or Johnson’s, had gone public early during that war? Would sixty years of excruciating American history have been altered? Would half a million men still be whole?
God.
There was a knock on the door. It was one of the Marines, come to take his bags.
“Helicopter’s two minutes out, General,” said the private.
“Take my clothes,” said Perry, pointing to the large bag. “I’ll be right there.”
“Yes, sir.”
Perry glanced back at his phone. His duty was to inform the president, not to make the decision for him. And just because he disagreed with the decision, deep in his heart, didn’t mean it was necessarily the wrong decision.
And the question of whose right it was to declare war? Of whether the president was above the law?
No one was above the law. And his ultimate duty was not to the president, but to the country.
Perry punched the numbers for James’s phone.
32
The border of China and Vietnam
The driver Colonel Dai had given Zeus drove like a maniac, pushing up and down the hilly roads without using his lights. The BJ’s springs seemed theoretical only, and Zeus felt every bump and pothole. Even though he knew the explosives in the back were safe — he’d seen a demonstration once where someone had struck a block of C4 with a hammer without it going off — he couldn’t help but be nervous about it. He kept thinking some sort of freak accident might somehow crush the bricks together in a way that beat the one in a million odds against them igniting.
They were just approaching the border when he got an encrypted message on the satellite phone’s text system.
The missile drop had been approved. He had contact information for the aircraft.
Zeus checked his watch, then looked at the GPS. It was two a.m.; his last estimate had the Chinese arriving no later than six. The plane would be over northern Vietnam roughly at five.
The spot where he wanted to set up the demolition was almost exactly thirty-four kilometers away by air. But it was nearly four times as far by road, or at least by the roads they would have to take. There was no way he could get there, then get back across the border in time to get a drop from the aircraft, let alone travel back north with the missiles.
He could give the recognition codes to one of Trung’s men, but that wouldn’t leave enough time to get the missiles north.
They needed to arrange the drop in China. It was the only way it would work.
Here was a problem the programmers who designed the Red Dragon war game had never thought of — scheduling conflicts.
Zeus had enough experience with covert missions to realize that the last thing he was going to do was call Lucas or anyone else in Washington to ask for a change in the drop site. No, the only way to guarantee that he could get the missiles to the place he needed them was to talk to the pilot himself.
It wasn’t exactly standard protocol, but the ad hoc nature of the mission made it easy. He had the pilot’s radio frequency; he was supposed to confirm the drop point when the plane was fifteen minutes out. All he had to do was give him a new set of coordinates over the border.
A few klicks one way or the other weren’t going to make much difference to whoever was flying the plane.
Assuming he got the right pilot. He’d have to take that gamble.
* * *
They made good time, reaching the spot where the road had to be blocked a little after 3:30 a.m. Zeus, watching their position on the GPS unit, tapped the driver as they approached the spot. They stopped in the middle of the road, brakes squ
ealing.
Zeus got out, signaling to the driver to stay where he was. The Joes followed, walking along silently, examining the terrain like a pair of detectives looking over the scene of a crime.
It didn’t look anywhere near as promising in person as it had in the photos. Zeus walked up the road to the curve, trying to orient what he had seen on the satellite image earlier with what he was seeing now. The road curved to his left about twenty yards ahead, tucking around a ledge of rocks. His idea was to hike up the side and start a landslide, but now as he looked at the road he realized that the area on both sides of the pavement was quite wide; he wasn’t sure the boulders would completely block the road.
The Joe who’d worked on highways definitely agreed. He made a long explanation in Vietnamese, the vast bulk of which was lost to Zeus. But the word “no” was pretty clear. The expert pointed with his hand that they should look farther north along the road. He had brought a paper map, and pointed to a spot marked as a small bridge.
That was a hundred yards up the road. They went there, but Zeus decided the banks of the streambed it forded weren’t deep enough to stop a determined commander — and the speed of the armored units indicated they were being led by one.
They checked their maps. Zeus found a bridge two miles away. The Vietnamese expert agreed it was worth trying.
“We have to go on,” he told the driver. “There’s a bridge, about two miles — three kilometers.”
The driver stared at him.
“Ba,” said Zeus, using the number for three and pointing. Finally, the engineer in the back leaned forward and told the man where to go. He must have warned him that they were running out of time, for the man sped recklessly. Even with the wide roadway and apron, they barely avoided sliding into a set of boulders at the far end of the turn.
Zeus gripped the GPS unit in his left hand, holding on to the BJ with his right. His pack was wedged between his feet, the rifle stock visible and easily reached through the unzipped top.
