by Larry Bond
“We have aircraft operating in this area here,” said Owl Eyes, pointing to the map. “You see his transmission was in this area, not very far from FOB number two. We have two aircraft crisscrossing the area, listening for transmissions. The next time he makes a call, we will be able to pinpoint it.”
“On the military network or civilian?”
The briefer shook his head. “Civilian definitely. Military maybe. There are a number of factors—we may at least be able to find a transmission. Decrypting it—possibly, but there are no guarantees.”
“Good,” said Jing Yo.
Not coincidentally, FOB #2 was the forward operating base where they had met the briefer. It was a former orange grove plowed under for use as a helicopter landing field.
“The electronics aircraft are excellent planes. Canadian Twin Otters.” Owl Eyes continued, telling how the insides had been gutted and then equipped with electronic devices that were at least as good as anything the Americans were fielding. It was undoubtedly an exaggeration, though how much Jing Yo couldn’t tell.
Nor did he really care. He was much more interested in finding a helicopter for his team.
There were plenty outside. The newest ones—Z-10 gunships—were ferocious warplanes but could not carry passengers. For that job they would use Chenyang Stallions, Chinese copies of the Sikorsky S-76. It was a smaller, more maneuverable aircraft than its brother, the more famous S-70 Sikorsky Blackhawk used by America and its NATO allies. The Chinese company that built the helicopters was being sued by Sikorsky for patent violations—a sign to Jing Yo that it had done its work well.
“The American may have several men with him,” said Owl Eyes. “If this is a trap, he will be armed with antiaircraft weapons.”
“Why do you think that?”
Owl Eyes gave him a blank look. “I think that because, because it makes sense.”
“If it is a trap.”
“I would not underestimate them.”
“I don’t.”
But neither did Jing Yo overestimate them. The Americans bled like anyone else. He had dealt with a few in Malaysia, generally through proxies. They were very good, most of them, but human.
The intelligence officer started to tell him a few things about the terrain, how large swaths were being developed for farmland because of the effects of climate change, and how the jungle had become even more unruly because of the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which encouraged growth. Jing Yo already knew a great deal about all this; he’d had to learn it when planning his original mission. But he let Owl Eyes talk, unsure whether the man was authorized to know about those missions or not.
When they were finished, Jing Yo went to the mess tent to get himself some tea and something to eat before tackling his next piece of business— wrestling more men to help in the search. He had only his squad at present. True, he could call on regular army units to help—but they were the cause of the problem in the first place, and he was loath to rely on them.
That was the real difference between the Americans and the Chinese. Surely the Americans did not have to worry about politics and infighting between commands, the logrolling that was necessary to get simple directives fulfilled and enough men recruited for a task. Jing Yo was involved in a mission of considerable importance—or so he was told—yet he had not been assigned enough men to carry it out. Even the helicopters that were to transport him had been given over grudgingly.
How important was the mission, really? Maybe now that Na San had been taken, Sun simply wanted him out of the way.
No. The colonel’s anger had been real. And despite that, he had spoken almost kindly to Jing Yo. That could have meant only that this was more than a wild-goose chase.
Owl Eyes rushed into the tent, breathless.
“Lieutenant! We have him! We have a location for you! Six kilometers away! Hurry!”
~ * ~
19
Northwestern Vietnam
It seemed to Mara that she had just begun to drift off when the satellite phone began ringing desperately, its shrill clatter reverberating through the back of the truck.
“Yeah?” she said as she grabbed it.
“Mara, this is Lucas. Are you sleeping?”
“Sleeping?”
“Get up. I have a precise location on MacArthur. He’s in trouble. You’re only four kilometers away.”
Mara jumped up, shaking the fatigue and confusion away. “Give me coordinates,” she said. “GPS.”
“They’re already uploaded. How soon can you get there?”
“I can’t get anywhere until I know where they are.”
“Open up your system.”
Mara slid over to her gear, which she had piled next to her makeshift bed. She grabbed the handheld computer.
It was four kilometers away, all right, but there was a mountain in between. The nearest road would almost double the distance.
“What sort of troops are near there?” she asked Lucas.
“Our latest intelligence is nearly an hour old. We had elements of the Forty-fifth Division sweeping through. They’re infantry, light vehicles. There’s a small armored unit attached, APCs and armored cars. A handful of tanks. They were probing the area.”
“Roadblocks? Checks?”
“None on the latest imagery. We’re scrambling to get more real-time data and coverage. You’ll probably be there before we get it, though.”
“Great.” Mara reached down and began pulling on her boots.
“Be careful, Mara. Don’t take any unnecessary risks.”
You should have told me that before I joined the company, she thought.
Jimmy Choi had taken the first watch himself. His usual smile slipped when Mara told him that their subject was in trouble—but just a bit.
“We pull his fanny from fire, what you say?” The Korean slapped his hands together. “Four kilometers nothing.”
“It’s more like eight on the roads.”
“Four, eight—good round numbers. Very lucky.”
Jimmy trotted over to the tented lean-to his men had erected to sleep under. Three minutes later, he had them ready to go. He and Meanie, his fellow Korean, sat together in the Hanma. Moe, the Russian, rode shotgun in the truck with Mara behind the wheel; Jeb, the American-Eritrean, was in the back.
Moe grunted when Mara handed him the paper map. She didn’t speak Russian, and if he spoke English he had yet to share a word of it. But he looked vaguely Asian, certainly more so than the fair-skinned Jeb.
And Mara, for that matter. She pulled her soft cap down and pulled up her collar, obscuring but not hiding her European features.
Moe rode with a Chinese rifle locked and loaded upright in his hand. His own FN SCAR, configured for close-quarter combat with a stubby barrel, sat on his lap. He had ammo all around him, and two pistols on the floor. Mara worried about taking the bumps too hard.
The Hanma had the lead. Jimmy took them down the streambed pretty fast, then spun onto the hardtop, pressing the command car for all it was worth. Mara did the best she could do trying to keep up, but it was definitely a losing battle. The Hanma’s engine was nearly the same size as the truck’s but had a lot less weight to pull.
“Tell him to slow the hell down,” Mara told Moe finally as Jimmy disappeared around a curve. “We have to get there together. And in one piece.”
Moe didn’t answer. In fact, he made no sign that he had heard.
“Give me the radio,” Mara said, holding out her hand. “Radio.”
Moe grunted, but apparently not in assent, because he didn’t move. Mara slammed on the brakes.
“Radio, damn it.”
Moe looked at her, then slowly unhooked his headset and handed it over.
“Choi, where the hell are you?” said Mara, holding the mike up.
“Where you, boss lady?”
“I’m way the hell behind you. Wait for me until I catch up.”
“Ho-ho. We’re in a hurry, right?”
Jimmy started laughing. Mara put the truck back into gear. She found him waiting two curves ahead.
He didn’t adjust his speed all that much. As they came down a hill, they passed out of the jungle and suddenly had a good view of the valley where MacArthur had made his call.
“Wait,” Mara said over the radio. She slammed the brakes hard enough to jar Moe, then jumped out of the cab, running to the side of the road with her binoculars.
Lucas had described the surrounding area, saying that there was a farm very close to MacArthur’s hiding spot. Mara saw a farm that she thought might be it; smoke was rising from the barn. Roughly two dozen Chinese soldiers were in the field watching as it burned.
“Shit,” muttered Mara.
She pulled out her sat phone and called Lucas back. “Peter, can you connect me with the scientist?”
“How close are you?”
“Maybe two miles.”
“I’m reluctant to call him right now, Mara. It looks like the Chinese have an ELINT plane in the area. They may be looking for his signal.”
“I’m looking at the farm you said was near where he was. The Chinese have surrounded a barn. It’s on fire. If he’s there, I want to know.”
“Shit. Shit.”
Mara heard Lucas putting through the connection, then switching her into the line. A thin, tired voice came on.
“Yes?”
“It’s Peter, Josh. Are you in the barn?”
“Barn? What—no. No, I’m not.”
“Good. Are you safe where you are?”
“No.” It was an emphatic no.
“I want you to find a good hiding place, a very good hiding place, and stay there,” said Mara. “I’ll worry about everything else.”
“Who are you?” Josh asked.
“Josh, I want you to find a hiding place near where you are,” said Peter. “Don’t say anything else. Sign off now.”
His line cut out.
“Stand by for the location,” Lucas told her. “It’s two kilometers to the west of that farm.”
Lucas said something else, but his words were drowned out by the heavy drone of approaching helicopters.
“Ho-ho, better get back in the truck,” shouted Jimmy Choi from the Hanma. “Those are Z-10’s—Chinese versions of the Apache. If they even suspect we’re not on their side, they make us wish we were.”
~ * ~
20
Northwestern Vietnam
Mạ didn’t weigh much, but in his depleted state, she felt like an anchor as Josh struggled up the hill on the bike, desperately pedaling away from the burning barn. The gun strap kept slipping down his arm. He tried twisting his shoulder up to keep it in place, but the only real solution was to take his hand off the handlebars and move it back. Every time he did, the bike pitched to the left, and he had a hard time keeping his balance.
Sheer adrenaline propelled him, but even adrenaline had its limits. Finally Josh had to stop, the bike nearly dropping out from under him as his strength failed. Mạ jumped off, landing on her bare feet, legs bent and body ready, as if she were a wrestler getting ready for an opponent.
“We’ll have to hide,” he said.
Josh got off the bike and wheeled it into the jungle beyond the road. Mạ followed as he pushed through the thick bushes. He rammed the bike forward so carelessly that he nearly pushed it into a tree.
He was starting to lose his grip, starting to give in.
I’m in survival mode, he told himself. Stay alert. But the words were more a theory than a command, and far from a plan. What was the plan? To survive long enough for Peter to grab him and get him the hell out of there. Which was hardly a plan at all.
What if they just gave themselves up to the Chinese? Weren’t the Chinese America’s allies? Or friends, at least. Business partners. America bought Chinese goods, all sorts of goods. China bought American bonds.
The soldiers he’d seen in the field weren’t anyone’s friends.
Josh rolled the bike under a nearby bush, hiding it. The Chinese would never see it from the road, and they’d have no reason to come here—unless they were looking for them.
What if the man who called himself Peter wasn’t working for the CIA at all? What if he wasn’t American? What if he was Chinese?
The thick stretch of trees gave way to a sparse patch of jungle, very lightly wooded. Josh stopped at the edge of this partial clearing, trying to figure out what it was. Rock outcroppings poked from the ground at his right; the terrain seemed too rocky to be a farm field. But maybe that’s why it had been abandoned.
Mạ tugged at his arm, then pointed to his side.
“I’m okay,” he told her. “I cut myself.”
The pain from the wound had slackened. It no longer seemed to be bleeding, though his shirt was stained dark red. He held out his hands, shrugging as if it were nothing. She looked as if she was ready to cry.
“It’s okay. Just a cut. A lot of blood, but no real harm,” Josh told her. “Okay. It’s okay. You understand ‘okay’?”
He tried to think of words to use to reassure her, but he couldn’t find any. His Vietnamese vocabulary, never large to begin with, had totally deserted him.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s find a place to hide.”
He walked along the rock outcroppings. There had been a road here not very long ago. The jungle had rushed back in, but it was too soon for thick trees.
Josh spotted the remains of a shack, busted down and overgrown, opposite the rocks. A rusted sign lay half covered with dirt and weeds in his path. He pointed to it, trying to get Mạ to read it, though he wouldn’t have understood even if she did.
The loud stutter of an approaching helicopter, of two or three or four helicopters, reverberated through the hills. Josh looked up and decided they needed to find a spot with more cover from above.
“This way,” he told Mạ, starting toward what looked like a large rock about twenty yards ahead.
As he came closer, Josh saw it wasn’t a rock at all, but the remains of a structure. It was too overgrown and ramshackle to provide any cover. Just beyond it, however, the rocks formed a narrow ledge and a cleft in the hill. He led Mạ to it, and pushed her beneath it. She barely fit, but Josh knew he couldn’t leave her alone.
“I’ll hide in the trees,” he told her, this time remembering to mime. “I’ll be right there.”
She grabbed hold of his leg and wouldn’t let go.
“You’re safer here,” he said. “They’ll come after me. They won’t bother you. They won’t be expecting a kid.”
He hoped he wasn’t lying.
As he started to push her back into her spot, he looked up and caught sight of something large beyond the row of rocks, a green hole at the edge of the jungle.
It took a few seconds for him to realize that it was the gaping mouth of a mine shaft, roughly six feet tall and only partly reclaimed by nature.
He tugged Mạ from her hiding place. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a mine shaft. We’ll hide there. We can both hide there. Come on.”
~ * ~
21
Northwestern Vietnam
Jing Yo tightened his grip on the handle at the side of the helicopter door, waiting as the aircraft banked toward the small farm on the side of the hill. Thick black smoke curled from the undersides of the tin roof, seething outward as if the barn were a pot with an overcooked stew. He looked back into the compartment and saw Sergeant Wu grinning behind him.
“Did our work for us,” yelled the sergeant, leaning toward him. “Now maybe we get some rest.”
The helicopter pitched backward slightly as it landed. Jing Yo leapt onto the uneven ground and, head lowered, trotted toward the knot of soldiers standing near the building.
“Who’s in charge here?” he yelled.
“Sergeant Wong,” replied the private closest to him. The man barely glanced at him.
Ordinarily, Jing
Yo didn’t stand on ceremony, especially when in a hurry, but the private’s attitude could not be ignored.
