“Karate sparring rules.”
“No grappling, then? You do realize this is a hand-to-hand class, don’t you?”
“Sparring rules with hand-holds, okay, ma’am?”
“As you wish, Midshipman.”
In the background, the sergeants snorted, and the class fell quiet. Perhaps too many of them had already been handled roughly by this young man in practice sessions – but was he a bully, or did his sneering arrogance merely indicate the last vestiges of an adolescence the Academy’s ‘harassment package’ had yet to shake out of him? He raised his hands once again into the usual sparring position, one hand in front, one foot forward, but Emily merely closed her eyes and stood straight up, facing the class.
“Ma’am?” he said, but she didn’t respond.
Breath came in and breath pressed out, though she spent very little muscular energy on this process, preferring to let it move of its own accord, to the extent this was possible. He grew more perplexed, she felt this, but what would he do about it. Would he strike her, or merely grab her? She heard an analogous confusion in the rest of the class. They hardly breathed at all, stifled by their confusion. The sergeants, too, hardly breathed. What did they expect? By all rights, they should have known how to handle him, and asking her to do it for them seemed… well, it was amateurish. This isn’t how you train soldiers, asking someone on a temporary posting in the Office of Public Affairs to solve your problems.
There, that was it, the little bit of resentment that had been tickling the back of her mind all morning. She breathed it out, opened her eyes, and turned to face Callahan, who’d dropped his guard by now.
“I’m confused, ma’am. What is it you expect me to do here?”
“The choice is the same as before, Mr. Callahan. Subdue me, or see if you can make it to the door.”
“This is kinda bogus, ma’am… I mean, permission to speak freely?”
“Granted.”
“I don’t want to hurt you…”
“But you do want to vaunt over me. You do think I’m not a real opponent, despite what happened the first time you tried to grab me. I tricked you, somehow, or at least, I must have cheated. Is that it?”
“Not exactly, ma’am… I guess.”
“You can’t just take muscles into battle, Mr. Callahan. You also need a fighting spirit. Now show me yours.”
“Then raise your guard, ma’am. This doesn’t make sense otherwise.”
“Fine,” Emily said, and raised her hands, though her guard didn’t seem quite right, open hands, one held high as if in greeting, the other low as if to receive a gift.
After a tense moment, Callahan risked a roundhouse kick to the side of her head. “Nice form,” Emily said, as she leaned out of the way. “You need to work on focus.”
As he pulled the leg down, with a jab already prepared from the other side, she hooked his foot and pulled him forward and off balance. He hit the floor with a loud grunt, and just as he looked up, she placed the heel of her foot against his nose. Wide-eyed, he picked himself up and stood to face her again, but uncertain how to hold his hands or his feet.
“You’re limber, Mr. Callahan, and you’ve had some training, but you’ve never actually been challenged before, have you?” He didn’t respond, the same blank bewilderment still etched across his face. “It’s okay, son,” – did she really just call him son? Barely six years older than him, and already it felt like a younger generation crowding her. She needed a moment to gather herself from her own confusion. “Do you want to try one more time?”
He nodded and stood to face her again, brow furrowed, determined not to make the same error again, whatever the error had been. Emily circled to her left, crossing in front of his dominant side – would he mistake this for an opening and swing at her with his right hand? No, he was too hesitant even for that. After another moment, she stopped moving and looked him in the eyes.
“You have to make a move sooner or later, young man.”
“You’re not making a move either, ma’am.”
“Why should I? You have the advantage in size and strength, and probably speed, too. It’s not to my advantage to attack.”
“But then this isn’t really a fair fight, ma’am,” he said, dropping his guard. In this new opening, Emily slipped one foot behind the other and planted a crossover sidekick into the center of his chest, knocking him backwards several unsteady steps, as the rest of the class gasped. He found his footing, still tottering and clutching his knees, and after a few seconds of labored breathing he managed to straighten himself up.
“Is it a fight now, Mr. Callahan?” Something flared up behind his eyes at her taunt and he stepped back towards her. “Don’t ever drop your guard and whine about fairness to me again. There’s no such thing as a fair fight. If you can’t figure that out, then a Marine billet is not for you.”
She held her hands on her hips as she spoke, inviting him to attack – there’s no way he could resist the poetic justice of smacking her at least once in the face while her guard was down. A jab went awry with a nudge from the flat of her hand, and she leaned away from an overhand right, and smacked the left hook across his chest. Before he could right himself and correct for the distance to swing at her again – since she was much too close now – Emily slipped one foot between his legs and pressed up against him, and thrust a hand up to grab his throat before shoving him to the floor.
She ended up on top of him, squeezing his windpipe and holding a second strike at the ready, when he bucked her forward to get her off of him. Emily rolled and pivoted to face him as he scrambled to his feet and raised his guard. The anger and frustration in his eyes had faded away, and now she could read his perplexity and embarrassment there, and maybe even a tiny hint of resolve.
“That’s better, Mr. Callahan. Now you’re ready to fight me. Show me what you’ve got.”
With an inchoate roar, he launched himself at her, hoping to smother this tiny slip of a girl under his bulk. That’s how it must have seemed to the class, given his enormous advantage in size and muscle – and what else could he do, since his attempt at sparring with her had failed so utterly? How surprising, then, when she ducked under his outstretched arms, seized a wrist and shouldered him up and over. A tug on the wrist pulled his head and torso down into a tumble and his shoulder struck the mat before the rest of his bulk slapped down. He sprang up immediately – how had he not been injured in that fall, the class might well have wondered – and lunged back towards her, reaching out for her neck, until another spinning back-kick caught him in that same soft spot just below the sternum, and she kipped herself up along a captive arm and scissored her legs around his neck. Once again, the rotational inertia of her body, so high above his center of gravity, spun him down into the mat, and she twisted that wrist until he tapped out.
“I think we’ve ended up in the same place again, Mr. Callahan,” she said, before releasing him and untangling her legs. She crouched next to him as he lay on the mat for a few seconds trying to recover his breath.
“How do you keep doing that to me, ma’am?”
“I’m a lot meaner than you are – welcome to the Marines. Maybe you can get Staff Sgt Durant to explain it to you.” She reached down to give him a hand up and guided him to a place among the rest of the class, who all stared at her. “Can I entrust this class to you now, Sgt Perez?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
“Thanks, LT,” Durant whispered, as he walked her to the door. “I think you opened his eyes.”
2
Getting One’s Bearings
“I need to get back,” Danko shouted over his shoulder as he ran through the tunnel complex, though perhaps it would be more accurate to call them caves, or some mix of the two.
“Slow down, big guy,” Connie called ahead, struggling to keep up in the low light. These were his caves, not hers, after all. “Get back where? Do you know where they’d have gone?”
“Yeah… sort of. I’m not sure.
” Danko stopped to consider the options, standing under a flickering fixture. “Thailand, the camps south of Chiang Mai. That’s where I should start.”
“You mean ‘we’, right?”
It took him a moment to digest her words, his eyes perhaps only now bringing her completely into focus. “We?”
“Of course. You came along to keep my girl safe. It’s the least I can do to repay the favor.”
“I took too long getting back. What the hell was I thinking?”
“Let’s just take a moment to gather ourselves and formulate a plan.” Connie pulled him away from the rough stone of the wall, which was damp from condensation. Meacham’s construction crews had come perilously close to exposing some source within the mountain, which probably would have flooded the whole complex. Then they’d have had to start from scratch on another island. As it was, water merely oozed through the wall and collected on the edge of the floor along this section of the main corridor, before seeping back into the earth. “Should we look for a message?”
“She won’t have left a message here, not if they had to leave under fire.”
“Would she have taken her men directly back to the Shan Highlands? Wouldn’t that be dangerous?”
“No, you’re right. She’d have been careful about that. We had escape plans, and they involved island-hopping through the Pulau chain. But if the Chinese were here in force, those routes might have been compromised.”
“So, the question is, how do you get almost five hundred men through a naval cordon?”
“That’s what the Rigid-inflatables were for. First, get most of the men to Sangihe, and let them work their way up to General Santos City, where they can connect with the Moros. Most of the rest would head southwest and make for the Malacca Strait, lose themselves in the ordinary traffic in the shipping lanes. Above all, the point would be not to hurry, to draw no attention.”
“You said ‘most of the rest.’ Who’d be left?”
“Tammy and Hsu Qi. That’s who the Junta is really after. If they’re captured, the movement will fall apart, at least for this generation.”
“What was their escape route, then?”
“It was stupid… and I told her so, over and over.”
“Well?” Connie shook him by the shoulders. “Don’t keep me hanging.”
“She kept a catamaran disassembled in a cove at the north end of the island. The idea was to sail west, to Palawan.”
“Even if that’s where the enemy was… because, given the trade winds, that’s the most likely… they’d be heading right into the teeth…”
“Not ‘if.’ That’s what she’d be counting on. She always used to say, if you run from a wolf, it can’t help but chase you. That’s all it knows. If you run towards the wolf, it will let you pass in the confusion.”
“That’s very ‘zen’ of her. Who knows… it just might work. But a catamaran?”
“Yeah, you know the kind with no rigid deck, just canvas stretched over the spars connecting the pontoons. Since there’d be no cabin to hide in, she figured there’d be less reason to stop them to search anything. It would just be the two of them, Tammy in shorts and a floral shirt, and her in a sarong over a swimsuit.”
“Well, she’s got style. I’ve got to hand it to her.”
“And even if they were stopped, unless the Chinese have better intel, a current photo, that sort of thing – which is extremely unlikely, since she’s always been really careful about stuff like that – there’d be nothing to find in the pontoon compartments.”
“Just a couple of tourists who got blown too far east from Palawan.”
“Exactly.”
“It just might work.” Connie tried to make eye-contact with Danko, to shore him up with a stern glance. “Look, our best move is to act on the assumption that she made it through. If she hasn’t, we’ll find that out soon enough. It’s not like the Junta would keep it a secret. They’d trumpet it across every news cycle. That means we still have at least a couple of weeks to find a rendezvous, since they’re not likely to get back to Chiang Mai much sooner than that.”
“Right, I suppose we should go back to Davao, and then head to Malaysia. I’m still persona non grata in Thailand, so the border crossing will be tricky.”
“In that case, maybe we could fly into Hanoi and cross through Laos.” A sickly smile crept over Danko’s face at these words. “In bad odor in Vietnam, too, then? We can always do it the old-fashioned way and fake the papers.”
“I’d rather avoid border control altogether, if it’s all the same to you.” He straightened himself up with these words, as if bringing a difficult task into pragmatic focus made it easier to face the other uncertainty. “If we fly into Penang and take a ferry to Langkawi… from there, it’s a short boat ride to Satun, and we can swim ashore.”
“I guess we’ll need to do some shopping in Davao.” When Danko tilted his head uncomprehendingly, she explained. “I’m gonna need a new swimsuit, and you’ll need some board shorts, or at least something touristy.”
“This isn’t Phuket, or one of the other tourist beach towns. We’re gonna be picking our way through rubber plantations and the occasional mangrove forest.”
“You really know how to show a girl a good time.”
On the ride back to Kamako, where Connie had rented the fishing boat, his mood lightened, and he became more talkative. Spray flared over the open cabin as they bucked a bit of chop before cresting the riptide at the mouth of the harbor, and he shouted perhaps louder than necessary.
“I don’t think she heard me.”
“Who?” Connie turned to examine his face. “Hsu Qi?”
“No. Tenno… I mean Emily, you know… George’s daughter. I don’t think she heard what I said. At least I hope not.”
“You mean about all the killing?”
“Yeah. I felt kinda bad about that. It’s just that Tammy lost his whole family to Walker, and she looks so damn much like him… and when I saw her use that sword…”
“She’s got a way of reading people, whether she heard you or not. It’s best not to dwell on it. Just keep thinking of her as Kane’s daughter. She’s much more like him than she is like her uncle.”
“Maybe she is, though George would never use a sword… something about killing too quickly, before you get a chance to see if it’s possible to keep someone alive. That’s why he didn’t care for long rifles. He preferred to meet the enemy face to face, and left the long-range stuff to me… and that was just fine by me.”
“I didn’t really have a chance to get to know him, and he was damned psycho through and through, but he had a similar preference. He’d never look through a scope. It was always face to face with him, too.”
“Yeah, but he liked killing, and George didn’t.”
“Do you seriously think she enjoyed what she had to do on Itbayat?”
The question silenced Danko, and he scanned the harbor to avoid turning to face her.
“She did what was necessary, even if it meant sacrificing herself,” Connie continued, growing agitated. “Can you picture Walker ever doing something like that? Seriously, would he ever have sacrificed himself for anyone?”
“No. I guess not.”
Connie cut the RPMs and let the bow glide to the pier, spinning the wheel hard to starboard at the last second, while Danko swung the bumpers over the port side. She reversed the propeller for a moment and the gunwales came to rest inches from two pilings.
“Tie her off at the stern and let’s head to the airstrip, see if we can catch a lift to Davao before it gets dark.”
3
Raising The Dead
Sgt Durant had been jabbering about some hand-to-hand class for most of the ride down to Charlottesville, and Lt Cmdr Hankinson had long since wearied of it. He’d have cranked up the radio an hour ago to drown it out, if it weren’t all country stations in this stretch.
“But how’d you get her to agree to come, Sarge? I’d already given up the cause.”
/>
“That’s what I’ve been trying to explain, LC.”
Perry tilted his head to the side as he considered Durant’s beef-steak face. Was some subtle wisdom hidden there, in the most unlikely of places? “Sorry… what? She taught some kid a lesson and that…”
“Exactly. This kid was huge, and full of beans, you know…”
“… just like Tarot.” Perry shook his head in disbelief. “You non-comms aren’t as stupid as everyone thinks.”
“I wish I could say the same for the officers,” Durant replied for Perry’s benefit.
They passed through a few toney neighborhoods on the north end of town, and followed a winding road through the foothills. An opening in the tree-cover on the right revealed an unpaved, narrow road, and Perry turned the car down it and slowed in anticipation of a much rougher ride. A few dead trunks here and there had fallen against neighboring trees and now hung suspended on one side or the other of the roadway.
“This is definitely defensible,” Durant observed. “Lots of positions.”
They slipped through wooded hills, and glimpsed a gap in the trees that seemed to promise an open meadow – at least, that’s what the light hitting the lower foliage suggested – until a few turns later brought them in sight of the main residence, at least for an instant. A makeshift gate blocked the road, and two men, wearing what appeared to be a variety of camo-casual, approached the driver’s side door. A third man watched from a discreet distance on the other side.
“They’re expecting us,” Perry said to the first man, who nodded back. “Is she here yet?”
“Yes, sir. I think they’re on the back lawn, with Sensei Oda.” He waved them through, and Durant gaped as the estate came into full view.
“This is her home?”
“Not exactly,” Perry said. “I mean, it is, for all intents and purposes, I suppose. But it belongs to the Cardanos. She’s sort of a family friend, who kind of lives with them.”
Girl Goes To Wudang (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 7) Page 2
