by Ian Slater
“Move off the road now!”
“Come on, Ralph,” a woman told the man. “Do as they say.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said the cop, one of the local policemen with knowledge of the area who’d been seconded to assist the Marines guarding the convoy. “There’s a good reason for it.”
“Damn well better be!” growled Ralph, but the cop and his other four comrades in Bravo One were relieved. Everyone’s nerves were on edge. Some of the police riders’ own families were leaving the island. “American refugees,” one of the cops had said. “It breaks your heart.”
“How long we got to wait?” asked Ralph.
“No more’n an hour, chief.”
“Jesus Christ — you know how cold it is in those damn cranberry bogs?”
“Ralph, c’mon! No sense in arguin’. They got the guns.”
It was 1:00 P.M., and Charles Riser, who’d been unsuccessful in attempts to get through to General Chang, whom he hoped might have learned something more about Li Kuan’s whereabouts, had caught the red-eye flight to Nanjing. He’d been waiting impatiently outside Nanjing Military District HQ since 9:00 A.M. Once more he pressed the button. General Chang’s aide-de-camp, a smartly turned out young captain in sharply creased field greens, appeared, and again Riser asked politely to see the general.
The response was in immaculate Mandarin: “The general is in conference and cannot be—”
“For four hours?” pressed Riser. “You did tell him it was urgent?”
“Yes,” Mr. Riser,” came the reply, this time in perfect English, the sudden switch from Mandarin calculated, Riser thought, to surprise him.
It did. By the time he’d thought of a follow-up question, Chang’s aide had closed the door. Again Riser heard the slide of the dead bolt. “Damn!” Now he was absolutely sure Chang wasn’t in Nanjing. Had they arrested him?
Meanwhile, the U.S. embassy in Beijing was receiving complaints about Riser’s persistence. Military affairs, Nanjing reminded Bill Heinz, were not Mr. Riser’s concern. Finally, Bill Heinz asked to see the ambassador, and told him, straight out, “Mr. Ambassador, I like Charlie Riser as much as anybody else, and I realize the death of young Mandy has undone him. But we all have our problems, and we have to move on. He’s making a damn nuisance of himself with the PLA.”
“Thought that was your job, Bill?” said the ambassador flippantly.
Bill Heinz flashed his diplomatic smile. “This time he took off to Nanjing to see General Chang.”
“On our time or his?”
“Ah … his. Took two days’ leave, but—”
“Our money or his, Bill?”
“Haven’t checked, sir. But the point is, if we don’t rein him in, State’s going to get a formal complaint from Beijing and we’ll be in deep shit, pardon my English. And we need all the help we can get from China in this war against terrorism.”
“You’re right, Bill. I’ll have a word with him.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll call him, tell him it’s official. He’s to come back immediately.”
Charlie’s exasperation at not being able to see Chang, the only Chinese official who’d really tried to help him after Mandy’s death, got worse with China Air’s delayed departure to Beijing.
Typically, there was only one attendant at the China Air counter to calm the throng of impatient travelers. “What’s the problem?” asked an Australian backpacker. “Where’s the bloody plane?”
The girl threw up her hands. “China Air all in a mess.”
“You’re right there, sweetheart,” said the Australian. “How ’bout some tucker — you know, food? We’ve been waitin’ here for bloody hours. You owe us a meal, I reckon.”
Other backpackers joined in, most of them trying to leave China as quickly as possible, before the war with Taiwan trapped them. Taiwanese missiles could hit all of China’s mainland coastal airports and Beijing. Riser stayed out of the counter squabble. The U.S. cultural attaché wasn’t hungry. The only reason he ate at all was to keep his strength up for his mission to track down Li Kuan and the thugs who’d murdered his daughter.
The crowd closing in on China Air’s lone clerk was so dense, a wave of claustrophobia passed over him.
“Mr. Riser?” The voice came from somewhere deep within the increasingly angry mob. Charles couldn’t see her but knew immediately it was Wu Ling, Chang’s mistress, who had also been Mandy’s closest friend in China. Then he spotted her. There was fear in her eyes, but he sensed it wasn’t from the threat of the mob getting out of control, a fear every “long-stay” foreigner in China had experienced at least once in China.
Suddenly, the crowd withdrew from the counter, like a wave sucked back into the sea, taking Wu Ling with it. A half-dozen or so airport staff had arrived behind the crowd and were carrying precariously stacked boxes of dinners. Several people were trampled underfoot and there was screaming and general mayhem. It took Wu Ling several minutes to get free. She told Charles she didn’t have much time — that the Gong An Bu were following her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. As her perfume washed over him, he could see Mandy. They had both worn — what was it? — Guilin Mist.
“The General,” she began, buffeted to and fro in an eddy of the mutton-and-rice-crazed crowd. “He has been arrested and put in—” Her English suddenly deserted her.
“Prison,” Charles said.
“Yes. In prison. It is very bad.”
“Why was he—”
“The army in Kazakhstan is being pushed back by the terrorists.”
“So he’s the scapegoat?” said Charles. “He’s being held responsible?”
“Yes. Responsible. I must go,” she said, and disappeared into the throng.
No doubt, Charles thought, the Gong An Bu had been following her.
On the flight to Beijing, the pilot announced that the PLA had won a great victory. The island of Kinmen had fallen to the combined might of the PLA defense forces, and the party was confident that total victory over the “breakaway province” of Taiwan would be attained within a matter of days. The plane erupted in applause and raucous self-congratulations.
“What about those bastard terrorists in Kazakhstan?” someone called out.
A man from first class entered coach class. He didn’t look like a high-level party functionary to Riser, but more like a Gong An Bu agent. There was a thuggish air about him despite the well-tailored Mao suit. He talked to the man who’d raised the question about the PLA’s offensive against the Muslim terrorists in Kazakhstan. The man, a short, pasty-faced individual, looked terrified, the man from first class bending over him.
Charles ordered a Tsing Tao beer. He needed to relax. Everything was getting too hyper. Confusing. Should the U.S. be backing the PLA offensive in Kazakhstan if China had started a war against Taiwan? Whatever the situation, surely the U.S., in its own interests, if not those of the Taiwanese, couldn’t let the island nation be governed by the Communists. It was America’s airstrip in East Asia. The Cold War, Charlie mused, for all its anxiety, was at least clearer, or seemed so. But sipping his beer, he concluded that probably in every war, including this one, the present always seemed confusing, as confusing as the jigsaw puzzle of World War I, which, with benefit of hindsight, seemed remarkably easy to understand. In fact, as any historian knew, it had been a puzzling complex of alliances, backroom deals, and parties who were friends one month and enemies the next—plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
He remembered his grandfather, one of the very few World War II veterans still alive, telling him about the utter confusion during that war when it came to who was on whose side. Italy was against us, then with us. The Romanians switched back and forth, some Ukrainians fought with the Nazis, and France was Britain’s great ally, but not Vichy France. Churchill ordered the British navy to sink the great French fleet in North Africa, killing French sailors, allies only weeks before, to ensure that the Nazis could not use the French fleet once France had falle
n. Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Far East, accepted the Japanese surrender in 1945, only to turn around and rearm the Japanese, using them as an ad hoc police force throughout Burma and Southeast Asia to prevent rioting mobs, the very people Mountbatten had been fighting for a few weeks earlier.
Great or small, Charlie decided, all war was byzantine, and all he cared about was living to see Li Kuan, like Saddam Hussein, hunted down and killed. That wasn’t confusing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Port Townsend
“I need some fresh air,” announced Aussie. “Anyone else?”
“I’ll come,” said David.
Sal and Choir, ignoring scatological insults from Aussie about Welsh wankers and Brooklyn Dodgers being lazy, elected to catch some sleep in the motel room Freeman had booked for them down the hall.
Outside, the streets were all but deserted, only patrol cars with slit wartime headlights moving slowly to enforce the curfew. A few dark shapes were visible in the weak penumbra of police headlights as people scuttled here and there, briefly silhouetted as they quickly slipped in and out of stores for emergency supplies. The Coast Guard — Canadian as well as American — were assuring the population via radio and TV that there was no danger of leaking radiation from the sunken vessels — that all the reactors on nuclear-powered U.S. warships were built to such rigorous standards that “there is little possibility of a split in the reactor.”
A motorcade passed by Aussie and David, including a Navy staff car bearing Margaret Jensen on a mission of mercy to Woodgate Hospital. Her intention was to show fearlessness in the face of the radioactivity scare and visit as many of the victims as she could. First she wanted to see Alicia Mayne and the other survivors of Utah.
Also, concerned about the welfare of the survivors of the sinkings, the commander of Fort Lewis had called Freeman, telling him it would be a good idea to have Medal of Honor winner Brentwood make himself useful at the hospital. “Be a damned good morale lift for our men and women. And it’d take him out of himself.”
“Good idea,” agreed Freeman, thinking, You wily polecat—can’t let the Navy grab Marte Price’s attention. Army Medal of Honor winner beats an admiral’s wife any day of the week, and the Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon would like what Fort Lewis did. “I’ll send him up, General,” said Freeman.
“How’d he do with the Bullpup?” the Fort Lewis commander inquired.
“Not well,” said Freeman bluntly, tired from watching Darkstar’s feed.
“So now he knows,” said the commander.
“Not sure about that,” said Freeman.
“Have him wear the ribbon, Douglas.”
Freeman called David on his cell phone. “Captain, get your butt up to the hospital. You are to go about, shake hands with those poor bastards, and smile! You know Marte Price?”
“Yes, sir. Skirt with the big tits.” It wasn’t David, but Lewis, listening in as usual.
“Lewis?”
“General?”
“You get back here. Monitor the UAV rerun. You’ve had enough fresh air.”
“Roger that.”
David flipped the cell phone shut. “Old man,” he told Aussie, “didn’t like that. What you said about the CNN reporter.”
Aussie shrugged as they headed back past the ferry terminal. To the east lay Whidbey Island, where, if all went well, the Navy would be launching the NR-1B. “Don’t shag any of the nurses up there!” he called back to David, who was already ascending the hill toward the hospital, pretending not to hear.
David knew his mission to the hospital was merely to smile and say a few words of encouragement. But after Afghanistan, he felt like a fake.
The exiting air from the hospital’s wards hit him in a toxic blast of charcoal-reeking burned flesh, oil and antiseptics. Mounds of soiled and blood-soaked sheets, blackened and singed naval uniforms, and ruined clothes that had belonged to civilians caught up in the infernos of the multiple disasters were now piling up in the corridors faster than the frantic staff could dispose of them in already overflowing Dumpsters. The ash of the hospital’s incinerator fell outside like gray snow as the staff worked overtime to cremate limbs and flesh contained in thick “recycled” paper shrouds designated by hurriedly wielded marker pens as “unusable,” any possible skin graft material being rushed in sterilized containers to the refrigerators. It was a scene so suffused with urgency and horror that David turned around to leave. The last thing anyone in this hospital needed was some Medal of Honor winner getting in the way when a split second’s delay in inserting an IV tube or in any of the surgical lifesaving procedures the ER staff were carrying out could cost someone their life.
“Captain Brentwood? David Brentwood?” The woman’s voice was accompanied by a glare of light from a shoulder-held KEMO TV camera, a scruffy looking, gum-chewing technician in obligatory faded jeans, and what Freeman would have called a half-ass beard, approaching David. The reporter, despite the long, rushed trip from Atlanta, looked as alert and as well-coiffed as any well-rested anchor. She extended her right hand, her left clasping the phallic-shaped mike. “Captain, I’m Marte Price.”
Before he knew it, David was shaking hands with the woman. She was taller than she looked on TV, where her legs, shapely as they were, were not on display; unlike her bosom, which had stopped many a channel surfer dead in his tracks. Her height added to her aura of vivacious authority. Despite his annoyance with her sudden and what he considered rude interruption, David felt a surge of excitement in his loins. Her sexuality, her perfume, was so alive and contrary to the misery and death surrounding them that he had no control over the kind of excitement she infused in him, a kind he’d not known since long before his near-mortal wounding in Afghanistan.
“Would you please move that contraption,” came a doctor’s angry voice. “This is a hospital, not Hollywood Squares.”
Marte smiled graciously and asked where she might conduct the interview with Captain Brentwood, who was visiting his “wounded comrades.” The doctor, oblivious to the correspondent’s charm, raised his lab coat’s blood-spattered arm and pointed brusquely to an orderly behind them, near the elevator. “Ask him.”
“Thank you. Captain Brentwood’s a Medal of Honor recipient,” Marte said, “and—”
But the doctor had already walked away, informing incoming paramedics that they’d have to use their ambulance gurneys as beds for their patients. “No more room.”
Marte Price worked her charm on the orderly, who steered them to a room down by a supply room.
“They’re all dead in there,” the orderly said. “It’ll be quiet, though.”
After entering the dark room, there was something wrong with the light switch. Marte’s cameraman, turning on his video’s light, started in fright. So did David. “Jesus!” said the cameraman. A man was standing by one of the beds. “Who are you?”
“Captain Rorke.”
Marte Price’s shock at hearing the strangely disembodied voice in the nearly dark room was immediately pushed aside by her realization that she’d lucked out. “Rorke? John Rorke?”
“Gold, Jerry,” the cameraman told Marte. “Pure gold.”
She knew it. Forget the wounded. An exclusive interview with the Utah captain — they’d have to find his cap, she thought, or one like it, wet and oily, if possible — would be more impressive. “Can we bring in more lights?” she asked Rorke.
“Maybe one. No more. She’s in enough pain already. It’ll blind her.”
David Brentwood, his eyes now accustomed to the semidarkness, the pervasive atmosphere of burned oil and flesh about him and the wokka-wokka sound of rescue helicopters, still bringing in wounded, was momentarily brought back to the cave during the Pave Low’s approach.
Now, in the glow of the other light that was brought in, he saw the patient, her face badly scorched, a skull cap of white bandages where her hair had been, and a semi-oval, torso-length frame, like a wooden cage, from her neck down
to her waist. Rorke, seeing David’s concern, explained to him that the frame was to keep the sheet from touching the part of her that must have been burned above the waterline as she struggled, like hundreds of others, to escape the encroaching firespills spawned by ruptured hydraulic lines on the sub.
David sensed that Rorke’s vigil was more than that of a commander trying to comfort his crew. “What was she doing on the sub?” he asked softly. He knew Congress was pushing for women on subs, since other countries had already initiated such a program, but David guessed this would be the first female combat death on a sub.
Rorke didn’t answer, and it took a few seconds for David to realize that the skipper of America’s most potent weapons platform — the ex-skipper, rather — wasn’t refusing to answer but was suffering from tinnitus, the ringing in the ears that so often followed the noise of massive detonations. In Rorke’s case it had been the horrendous roar of explosions that ripped his prized boat apart and killed most of his crew.
“What was her job?” David asked Rorke, his voice raised above the noise of the cameraman setting up.
“Civilian specialist,” John Rorke replied.
David nodded knowingly. “What’s her name?”
“Alicia,” said Rorke softly. “Alicia Mayne,” and David understood, in a flash, that Rorke had been in love, was in love, with the dying woman.
In one of those moments that sometimes only complete strangers share in the darkened interior of a night flight or train, knowing they’ll probably never meet again, when the heart is unashamed and free, Brentwood, a man whose natural inclination was to always mind his own business, never to intrude, asked, “Can she hear you at all?”
“If I lean close.”
“Stay close,” David told him. “Close as you can.”
David knew Rorke didn’t want to be part of any interview but probably felt duty bound to do so. David walked over to Marte Price. “Let’s do a ward tour,” he said. “I’ll speak to some of the wounded.”
She thanked him but said that first she wanted an interview with Rorke.
