Shadows of War

More Indian Cities Abandoned

MUMBAI, INDIA (World News Service) — India reported today that a further two hundred square miles of countryside east of Jaipur would be abandoned due to the continuing water shortages there. The largest affected city in the region is Phulera.

As recently as 2009, Phulera boasted a population of roughly 25,000. Nearly a decade of drought, however, had provoked an exodus that left it a virtual shell of its former self. Like many towns in the Indian state of Rajasthan, it has been all but abandoned for the past two years.

Scientists warned that Jaipur will be next. Despite widespread emigration from the area, the city remains home to approximately eight hundred thousand people, many of whom fled homes in the countryside over the past four or five years. Jaipur once supported a population above 3.2 million.

“What we are seeing here is a continuing human crisis,” said Kumar Singh, chief scientist for the India Drought Project, a nonprofit scientific group that has monitored India’s water shortage and its effect on population since 2005. “Last year, an estimated two and a half million people died because of the water shortages and the famines they caused,” he added. “This year, the toll will be even worse.”

In the capital, meanwhile, opposition party leaders attempted to blame some of the country’s woes on the failure of the prime minister to provide adequate…

1

The machine-gun fire that woke Josh sounded like the steady tapping of a heavy rain against a metal drum. An aircraft passed overhead, its engine a loud rasp. Josh jumped to his feet, but before he took a step to run, he remembered that he’d been very close to the trucks the night before. He lowered himself to his haunches, listening to the gun and airplane as he scanned the jungle around him.

The gun was behind him somewhere, to the north.

The airplane — he didn’t hear it anymore.

Trucks were moving in the distance. More vehicles, heavy ones, coming toward him.

Lieutenant Jing Yo tightened his hand on the steel rail at the top of the Chinese ZTZ99 tank, holding on as the tank rolled down the highway, passing the last of the wrecked Vietnamese troop trucks. It was the one that had given them so much trouble after crashing the night before; now its battered fender and windshield fit right in with the rest.

An American surveillance satellite had passed overhead barely an hour before. The optical lens on its camera would have snapped a picture of the line of Vietnamese troops trucks on both sides of the border, poised there, it would seem, following an aborted invasion.

The satellite’s orbit was common knowledge not only to intelligence agencies but to a small community of Internet geeks, several of whom would soon be pressing the Americans to release what they knew as rumors of the battle spread. It was all part of the campaign to make China’s invasion of its neighbor look justified — or at least justifiable enough to keep others from stepping in.

Jing Yo couldn’t have cared less for the international politics involved, but they had nonetheless dictated the schedule of the day’s operation. For the drive south had had to wait for the satellite to pass — proper public relations demanded clear and easily discernible “proof.” A snapshot of Chinese tanks rushing past the alleged bad guys would have made things unnecessarily complicated.

But the delay meant the operation was proceeding in daylight, increasing its danger. Already there had been reports of an aircraft, along with gunfire from units farther back in line.

It was now nearly noon, and it would take at least another hour for the lead elements of the brigade to reach Route 128. From there, it would be another half hour before they made Lai Chau, which sat at the intersection of Routes 127 and 12 farther south. Lai Chau was a key objective, for there was a small force of Vietnamese soldiers there; they were likely to be China’s first real test.

Jing Yo’s radio buzzed. It was Colonel Sun, a kilometer or two farther behind in a command car.

“Lieutenant, what’s going on up there? Are the tanks moving ahead?”

“Yes, Colonel. Good progress.”

“That airplane just now. Did you see it go down?”

“We’ve heard gunfire but saw nothing. The tanks are so loud — ”

“One of the antiaircraft units shot it down moments ago,” said Sun. “Go back with your men and find it. Make sure there are no survivors.”

“Colonel, if it was shot down, it’s no longer a problem. And in any event, its radio would have allowed it to alert the Vietnamese. In daylight, we have no real hope of cover. If I might suggest — ”

“What you would suggest is of no interest,” said Sun, practically shouting into his microphone. “Do as I tell you!”

“Yes, sir.”

“The air force is sending planes. I want that wreckage located so they cannot take credit for once.”

The real reason for Sun’s order — internal politics. Jing Yo should have guessed it.

“As you wish,” he told his commander. “What are the coordinates?”

2

Mara felt her stomach lurch against her ribs as the biplane pitched hard to the left, its wings shuddering under the violent pressure of the maneuver. The hillside was coming up fast.

“Pull up on the wheel,” said Ky Kieu. “Pull with me!”

Mara grabbed the yoke — it looked like a small, slightly squeezed steering wheel — and tried to yank it toward her, mimicking what Ky Kieu was doing. It was like pulling the back bumper of a cement mixer — the pressure against them was immense.

“What’s wrong with this?” she said.

“Pull!” yelled Ky Kieu.

Mara put her right leg up against the instrument panel, using it as leverage. The wheel barely budged. She pulled her left foot up and put it against the other side, pushing with all her might.

Treetops loomed in the windscreen.

Goddamn, she thought. What a place to die.

“Hold on!” yelled Kieu, adding a string of curses in Vietnamese.

The bottom of the fuselage slapped into the very top of one of the trees, which clawed at the plane like a cat raking its nails on a bird taking flight. There was a loud clunk behind them. The plane shook.

Then the sky in front of them cleared. They’d gone over the summit of the mountain.

“Now easy, easy,” said Kieu. “We have to level off. Don’t let go. Work with me.”

“I’m working with you.”

“Work with me. Easy. We turn now.”

Mara wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do, except not let go. She eased forward as much as she dared, which wasn’t very much. The nose of the Yunshuji-5 began to come down.

My head feels light, Mara thought.

She looked down, thinking maybe she had been shot and was losing blood. Then she realized they must be so high over the mountains that the air they were breathing didn’t have enough oxygen to sustain them.

She reached for the mask. The plane immediately dipped forward.

“What are you doing?” screamed Ky Kieu.

“I need to breathe,” she said. She reached down and fished the mask from her lap, put it on, and opened the valve. Then she reached over to Kieu, who’d left his around his neck. He was exerting so much pressure on the yoke that his blood vessels looked as if they were going to pop.

“Breathe,” she told him, opening the oxygen.

Kieu began hyperventilating into the mask. Finally his brain caught up with his body, and the breathing began to slow down, approaching something close to normal.

“We need to find a place to land,” Mara told him.

“No shit, CIA.”

“I’m not CIA.”

Kieu said something in Vietnamese. Mara ignored him, putting her hands back on the wheel to help steady it. The plane still wanted to pitch forward, though the pressure wasn’t quite as strong as earlier.

“Do you think you can hold it by yourself for a minute?” asked Kieu.

“I’ll try,” she said, putting her feet back up and tightening her grip.

The aircraft lurched when he let go, but she was able to keep it from plunging into a dive. In the meantime, Kieu rose and pulled off his belt. Then he rigged a harness to hold the wheel, strapping it to the seats.

“Let go,” he told her.

“You sure?”

“Let go.”

Mara took her hands off the wheel. Its nose slid down a degree or two, but it remained on course.

“What happened?” Mara asked. She rubbed her arms, which were starting to cramp with fatigue.

“Some of those bullets must have taken out the hydraulic control system.”

“Isn’t there a backup?”

“Yes — brute strength. Just like in the old days.”

The bullets had also presumably chewed up the control surfaces, making even brute strength difficult to apply. Landing safely was now their only goal. Kieu unfolded Mara’s map and examined it.

“There’s a strip near Cham Chu,” he told her. “We’re on almost a direct line. But it’s about a hundred and seventy-five kilometers away. Very long to fly. More than halfway to Hanoi.”

“Can we make it?”

Kieu didn’t answer, but evidently he didn’t think so, as he continued to study the map.

“We look like we’re getting a little closer to the hills,” she said.

He handed her the map, then took the yoke again.

“Help adjust the belt,” he told her.

They slipped the belt slightly higher and, after a little trial and error, had the plane running perfectly level.

“It’s all right,” Kieu told her. “We’ll aim for Cham Chu. When we get close, we’ll decide if we can return all the way to Hanoi.”

“What if we can’t make Cham Chu?”

“Then we’ll look for a road or a field. We don’t need too long a stretch. The farther we go, the easier it will be.”

Mara decided she should call the desk in Bangkok to tell them something was going on. The trick was doing that without blowing her cover.

“I have a friend who’s a pilot in Bangkok,” she told Kieu. “Maybe he knows a place where we could land.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’ll call him just in case. I’m not doing anything else.”

Mara took her sat phone out of her pocket and called the desk. Jesse DeBiase picked up as soon as the connection went through.

“Jess, how are you?”

“Mara I’m fine — how are you?”

“I’m looking for an airfield in northwestern Vietnam.”

“Good God, girl — what have you gotten yourself into now?”

“Still trying to hunt down that scientist I told you about the other day,” she said. “But you wouldn’t believe what happened to us. There were trucks, and I think some sort of tanks, and they fired at us.”

Mara imagined what a real journalist would say in that situation, pretending to be shocked and maybe a little naive. DeBiase caught on, prompting her with questions as if he were simply a concerned friend, while still pumping her for information.

Their conversation didn’t last long. She hadn’t seen all that much.

“They’re over the line then, the Chinese?” asked DeBiase.

“I couldn’t really say.”

“You mean it’s hard for you to talk, right?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“But those were Chinese vehicles firing at you.”

“Probably.”

“I’m going to get someone to look for an airstrip,” he told her. “In the meantime — the NSA detected some radars being turned on near the border.” He read from the agency’s secure text communications system. “ ‘The radar profile is generally used in searches, usually coordinated with PLA air force aircraft.’ You may have company, Mara. I’ll get back to you.”

“Fantastic.”

She pushed the sat phone back into her pocket. One consolation — whatever Fleming knew, it was largely obsolete by now. Connecting with him was no longer important.

“What did your friend say?” asked Kieu.

“He knows someone who knows someone. He’s going to call back.”

“Soon?”

“Pretty soon.”

Kieu nodded. His face looked grimmer than before she had called.

“You want me to take over for you?” she asked.

“No. It’s not too bad.” He hesitated. “The problem is our fuel. We’re losing some out of the tanks. I can’t seem to isolate the problem. Each one must be leaking a little.”

Mara raised herself in the seat and began looking at the ground for a road. But the thick jungle made it hard to see.

The sat phone buzzed. Mara was so intent on looking for a place to land that it took her a few seconds to grab it from her pocket.

“There’s a town called Nam Det,” said DeBiase. “Can you find it?”

“Maybe.”

“You want to stay away from Lao Cai,” he added as she looked. “It’s right on the border. We think it will be one of the Chinese’s first targets.”

Mara unfolded the map and found Nam Det, a small dot in Lao Cai Province, twenty-five or thirty kilometers from the border and off the main roads.

“On the south side of the village, there’s a long field. We’ve uh, been familiar with it in the past,” DeBiase told her. “Relatively recently.”

“Okay.”

“The French used it right after World War II,” he added. “Some OSO people took off from there in 1946 on a mission, I’m guessing to China. They used a DC-3. Whatever you’re in should be able to land there.”

He was telling her that so she could share it with the pilot if he had any doubts. OSO was the Office of Special Operations, the interim agency between OSS and CIA.

“I’m looking at a sat photo,” said DeBiase. “There are rice paddies all around it. It stands out. There’s a little hamlet next to it; Nam Det is to the north, a kilometer maybe.”

“We’ll try to stay out of the rice.”

“We have another alert from the NSA. There are Chinese MiGs in the air. Our Air Force intel center confirms it. This is the whole shooting match here, Mara. The Chinese are going into that country.”

“Great.”

“Thought you’d want to know. You want me to stay on the line?”

“We can handle it from here, thanks.”

Kieu turned to her as she put her phone back into her pocket.

“So?”

“My friend says there’s an old field at Nam Det.”

“Nam Det? Where is that?”

She showed him.

“Your friend is sure?”

“His friend was very sure. And he brought an image up on Google Earth. He says a DC-3 could land there.”

“DC-3s haven’t flown for fifty years,” said Kieu. “What is he? Another spy?”

“I’m not a spy.”

“A drug smuggler?”

Mara gripped the handhold on the cockpit’s windshield pillar, peering down at the ground. According to the map they were a little under fifty kilometers away — maybe twenty minutes.

“Help me with the yoke a minute,” said Kieu. “We have to adjust our course to make that airfield.”

Mara put both hands back on the yoke. The aircraft didn’t seem to be fighting them quite as fiercely as it had before. Kieu tipped the wings very gently, steering the plane toward a beeline for the field. When he got on the proper heading, he reset the belt and told Mara she could take a break.

“If you see anything that looks like it might be big enough to land on, straight enough, let me know,” he told her.

“Sure.”

“From here, it would look like about two fingers long,” added Kieu. “Maybe a little less.”

Nothing below looked two fingers long, let alone the occasional squiggles of red and black roads that peered through the jungle canopy. A large portion of western and northern Vietnam had been clear-cut over the past ten years, but from here the terrain looked as thick and jungle-bound as ever.

Kieu’s hair, neck, and shirt were soaked with sweat. His cheeks looked as if they’d been sucked inward, and his forehead had furrowed to the point that it looked like a stairway to his scalp. He seemed to have lost about ten pounds and aged ten years in the past half hour. If the flight continues too much longer, Mara thought, he’ll shrivel into an old man.

“How’s the fuel look?” she asked, leaning over toward his side of the dash.

Kieu nodded back in her direction, indicating that the fuel panel was on the right side of the instrument array. She saw round dials with arrows pointing to the left, though with the symbols written in what looked like Chinese she had no idea what she was looking at.

“I’m sure we’ll make it,” she said.

Kieu mumbled something in Vietnamese. She didn’t quite catch the words, but it didn’t sound like “you bet.”

“We can do it,” Mara told him. “Think positive. Cut back on your speed to save gas.”

“The problem is the leak, not the speed,” he said. He reached over and flicked a silver switch on the panel. “We’re leaking at a constant rate. I have to up the speed. That’s our only hope.”

“Go ahead.”

“The engine is already flat out.”

“Don’t give up on me, Ky.”

He looked at her, utter despair in his face.

“We’re going to do it,” she told him. “Tell me how I can help.”

Mara studied him, hoping for some inspiration that might tell her how to buck up his morale — no matter how dire their situation might be, it would be that much worse if he didn’t believe he could deal with it.

“Get the map and let’s check our distance,” he told her. “I’m going to take it lower.”

It wasn’t the most optimistic statement in the world, but it was a start. Mara picked up the map and found Nam Det again.

“Show me,” said Kieu.

She did.

“Twenty-five kilometers,” he declared. “Almost there.”

“See?”

He nodded.

Suddenly, they pitched downward. A black cloud passed over the cockpit as Kieu grabbed the yoke.

Mara, recoiling in her seat, caught sight of a dagger-shaped blur crossing past the windscreen.

One of the Chinese MiGs had found them.

3

Jing Yo could not divert the tanks from their primary objective, but reaching the point where the aircraft went down by foot might take an hour or more. So after taking a handful of his best men off the tanks, he waited along the side of the road as the column passed, until finally a Shaanqi SX2190 troop truck approached. Telling Sergeant Wu to block the way, Jing Yo waited by the side of the road for the truck to stop. Then he simply opened the door and got in, shoving the driver over to the empty seat beside him.

“Take the next truck, and follow me,” Jing Yo yelled to Wu. The rest of the commandos split themselves into two groups, climbing into the back of the trucks, where they jammed in with a platoon’s worth of regular troops.

The truck bucked as Jing Yo threw it into gear. He pulled forward, then made a U-turn, driving past the column of trucks that had stopped behind the Shaanqi.

The change in direction was too much for the unit commander, Captain Wi Lai, who had been sitting in the rear with his men as a halfhearted gesture of camaraderie. While at first cowed by the commando uniforms, now he began pounding on the bulkhead between the driver’s and passengers’ compartments, demanding to know what was going on.

Jing Yo turned to the driver and smiled. The man, a conscript who looked all of sixteen, didn’t smile back.

Three kilometers from where he’d turned around, Jing Yo found a dried streambed that led to the east. He put the Shaanqi into low gear and turned off the highway, descending a shallow drop to the bed.

Sand and very small pebbles marked the first half kilometer or so; Jing Yo found the going easy. But gradually the pebbles gave way to rocks and the potholes in the path became larger. There was no escaping up the banks, either — trees grew on each side, and where there were no trees the boulders and exposed rock made it impossible to pass. Jing Yo steered left and right, wrangling a way through the increasingly treacherous terrain until finally, a kilometer and a half from the highway, he could go no farther.

“Everyone out, let’s go,” said Sergeant Wu, leaping out as his truck stopped.

By now, Captain Wi Lai was too angry for words. His round pumpkin of a face was red, and as he came out to confront Jing Yo his arms pumped up and down like pistons in a diesel engine at red line.

Jing Yo ignored him, telling Sergeant Wu to divide up the men and fan out in a search pattern.

“Who the hell are you?” sputtered the captain. “Why are you ordering my men? Where are we?”

Jing Yo stared at him for a moment before speaking. The captain was well fed, his belly hanging over his belt.

“I am Lieutenant Jing Yo with the Special Squad. We are looking for an enemy aircraft that has been shot down. It is a crucial mission. You will help us.”

“You are a lieutenant?”

“I’m with the Special Squad,” repeated Jing Yo. “The commandos.” He took out his satellite phone, in effect dismissing the captain.

“I don’t care if you are with the premier’s bodyguard,” shouted Captain Wi Lai. “You are a lieutenant. I am a captain. I have an entire company to care for. The rest of my men — ”

“If you care to take it up with my superior, I will let you talk to him when we are done,” said Jing Yo.

Sun’s communications aide answered the call. There had been no new information on the aircraft; two gunners swore they had seen it crash exactly one kilometer from where Jing Yo was calling from.

A jet boomed in the distance. The air force was closing in. Sun would not be happy if they got there soon enough to somehow take credit for shooting down the plane.

He glanced up and saw the regular army captain glaring at him.

“I have a captain who wishes to talk to Colonel Sun,” Jing Yo told the aide. “I borrowed one of his platoons and two vehicles. They will be useful in the search.”

Captain Wi Lai grabbed the phone and began angrily demanding to speak to the colonel, complaining that he needed to keep his company intact. He was cut off in midsentence. Jing Yo heard the aide tell him that for the duration of the operation, Lieutenant Jing Yo was in charge and authorized to use his squad as he saw fit.

Still not satisfied — and apparently not smart enough to keep his mouth shut — the captain began to bluster again, demanding to know whom he was speaking to.

“Sergeant Lanna,” came the reply. And then Lanna hung up. “Lieutenants giving captains orders? Sergeants approving it? The army has gone crazy.”

Jing Yo took the phone from the captain.

“It will not be painful for you, Captain. If your squad does good work, you will certainly be rewarded. Best to accept reality.”

Jing Yo began walking up the streambed. It was not the first time he had seen a regular army officer confront the realities of army politics and the commandos’ place in the unwritten order of battle, but usually such confrontations were not as satisfying as this one.

Josh leaned on the fallen tree trunk, watching as the trucks continued to pass. He had kept count in the beginning, more in amazement than with a purpose. He’d never seen battle tanks before, and was amazed not only by how many there were, but at how fast they were able to drive on the road.

He stopped counting when he reached thirty. The tanks gave way to troop and supply trucks, then were replaced by more tanks. He estimated that at least 150 vehicles had gone down the highway in the past half hour, and the procession didn’t seem likely to end anytime soon.

The vehicles had characters and small red stars on their sides; some had Chinese flags. The Chinese were invading Vietnam.

This is what a war looks like, Josh told himself. No big set-piece battles, no arrows on a map, no roving video cameras and super-serious television announcers — just vehicles rushing by, machine guns in the distance, soldiers chasing you through the woods.

The Chinese were invading Vietnam. It was the start of World War III. And he had a ringside seat.

4

Mara grabbed the plane’s yoke, trying to help Kieu pull back to climb.

Except that’s not what he wanted to do.

“No, we’re diving. Push,” Kieu told her. “We get low. His radar will not be able to see us. Low.”

Mara leaned forward, going with him. The airplane zipped downward, a direction it seemed enthusiastic about trying.

“Look for the airstrip,” Kieu said. “It should be close. Or another place to land.”

As Mara raised her head, a swarm of bees flew in front of the windscreen, moving so close together that they looked like inky water coming from a hose. They flashed red as they passed; only then did she realized she was looking at cannon fire.

Her head began to float as Kieu dipped the plane hard onto its right wing.

“Hold on, hold on!” yelled the pilot.

The aircraft began to buck. Mara thought they’d been hit. She started trying to think of the best way to hold her body when they crashed.

“Where’s that field?” Kieu yelled. “I can’t see it!”

Mara pushed up in her seat. The ground was a blur filling the right side of her window. The left side of the window was blue.

“Steer the plane!” she said.

“I have the plane. I need a place to land.”

There was a hole in the trees in the right corner of the window.

“There — try there,” yelled Mara, pointing to it.

The plane dropped nearly straight down for a few seconds, then leveled off. She struggled to relocate it, finally spotting it much farther to the left.

The hole was black — a pond, not a field.

“It’s water,” she told him.

“It’ll have to do,” said Kieu.

He let the nose slip down again, then pulled up so abruptly that the plane seemed to stutter in the air. Mara took the hand grip with both hands, straining once more to see the terrain. A shadow passed across the trees on the left, cast by the MiG that was pursuing them.

“I think there’s a village — wait — can you turn right? Turn right!”

Once more, the plane pitched on its wing. This time, Kieu misjudged either the maneuver or his ability to hold it; the wing spun around and the plane went into an invert, twirling upside down. It began in slow motion, then sped as the yaw turned into something dangerously close to a spin.

By now they were barely a thousand feet above the ground, and Kieu had almost no room to recover. The biplane slid sideways through the air, a hockey puck gliding on ice. As it came over through the invert, Kieu managed to get it level.

Mara, her brain scrambled, threw her hand out against the windscreen.

And there was the field, right next to her thumb.

“The field is there on the right,” she told Kieu. “Get us there.”

“Okay, Okay. Hold on,” the pilot said, though he didn’t alter course.

Either thinking the biplane was going to crash or simply not realizing that Kieu would try to land, the pilot in the MiG pursuing them took a lazy turn above.

“Hold on!” yelled Kieu once more, and then he pushed the nose forward, setting up for his landing. But almost immediately he began to curse. The stick pulled and jerked, as if trying to wrestle itself out of his hands. Mara closed her eyes for a second, then decided she didn’t want to go out that way, if that’s what was going to happen. She bolted upright, facing reality with eyes wide open.

The ground, now mere yards away, was coming at them a lot faster than she had thought possible.

The biplane vibrated madly even before its wheels hit the ground. The first touch sent it bolting back upward. Kieu settled her down, holding the aircraft in a straight line as it ran down the old landing strip. He jammed the brakes. Dust flew everywhere. Pebbles and little rocks spit up so violently against the fuselage that Mara was sure they were being-fired at from the air. But the MiG was moving too fast to get a shot in, and passed harmlessly overhead as Kieu finally got the plane to stop about three-quarters of the way down the field.

“I knew you could do it,” Mara said.

“Out! We have to get out!” yelled Kieu. He undid his seat restraints and leapt up, running through the cabin to the door.

Mara followed. Kieu waited by the door; when he saw her, he threw the lever and pushed it open.

“Go!” he yelled, pushing her ahead of him.

Mara jumped to the ground. The MiG was starting a run above.

“The trees!” she shouted at him, then bolted forward, running on a diagonal toward the ditch at the end of the field about fifty meters away.

The Chinese fighter began to fire its cannon just as they got there. The 23 mm slugs hit the ground with a thick thud, chewing up the hard-packed dirt like a road cutter drumming through asphalt. Mara jumped on her rump and slid down into the ditch, huddling against the side as Kieu came down facefirst.

The MiG flashed by.

Mara help Kieu get to his feet.

“What did you do to my plane?” he said. “Why are they shooting at me?”

“I didn’t do anything. It’s the Chinese.”

“Look at my plane!” A look of shock come to Kieu’s face. He seemed a different man. “I have to save it.”

He started toward the airplane before Mara could grab him. She scrambled up the slope, chasing after him as the MiG began another run. Mara lunged just as the Chinese fighter began to fire, catching Kieu by the back of his legs in an open-field tackle that would have done an NFL free safety proud.

The air above them seemed to break in two: one of the tracers had found the biplane’s fuel tank, igniting the remaining fuel and vapors. The burst sent a fireball ricocheting upward from the plane, propelling the nose forward as shrapnel flew through the air.

“We have to get out of here,” said Mara, getting to her feet and dragging Kieu backward to the ditch.

Blood seeped across the back of his shirt. He began to moan.

Mara reached the ditch, slid down, then tried to hoist Kieu onto her back so she could carry him into the jungle, where they’d be less of a target. But though Kieu was shorter and lighter than most men, and Mara was bigger and stronger than most women, she couldn’t get enough leverage to hoist him; she had to duck down and practically wrap him around her upper body before she had a good enough grip to move.

By then, the MiG had banked again. Mara felt the ground start to shake. She ran for a few more yards, then felt Kieu starting to slip. She tried to keep him on her back by going down to her knees, but she stumbled. Her right arm scraped hard against the rocks as she sprawled forward, but she still managed to keep the pilot on top of her.

The MiG passed, rising nearly straight up as it went. Mara pushed back to her feet and staggered a few yards, gaining momentum. The ditch opened into a shallow field on her left; Mara picked up speed as she ran through it, finally reaching the trees and safety.

She let Kieu down off her back slowly. He collapsed like a half-filled sack of potatoes.

“Don’t fuckin’ die on me,” she said, clawing at the back of his shirt to check his wounds.

Blood oozed from two spots. One was below his left shoulder, where it seemed to be just easing out, almost by osmosis. The other pulsed in a small rivulet on the left side of his neck.

Mara ripped his shirt off and wadded it against his neck, pushing as hard as she could.

“Come on, come on,” she told him. “Stop bleeding.”

Kieu groaned. She took that as a good sign. But when she tried slipping the shirt away a short time later, blood quickly began to ooze out.

Mara twisted her body around so she could apply pressure with her knee and free her hands temporarily. Then she pulled off the rest of Kieu’s shirt. She tied it around his neck as a bandage, applying what she hoped was enough pressure to stanch the flow, but not quite enough to choke him.

The bleeding slowed, and he continued to breathe, though the breaths were shallow. Mara shifted her position around, keeping pressure on the wound with her hand while taking her sat phone from her pocket.

DeBiase picked up as soon as the call went through.

“How are you, Mara?” he asked, his usual jaunty tone replaced by a somber seriousness that seemed almost foreign.

“I’m okay. My pilot was hit by shrapnel. We’re at Nam Det.”

“What kind of shape is your plane in — ”

“Pieces. A MiG caught us and destroyed it on the ground. Maybe he was mad that we got away.”

“What kind of MiG?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if it was a MiG,” confessed Mara. “Is that important?”

“It’s all right. Whatever details you can remember, that’s all right. If you can’t, it’s not a problem.”

DeBiase was gathering intelligence, thinking about the bulletins he was going to send back to the States — bulletins he might even be sending as they spoke.

She was just thinking of dumb little things, like saving her neck.

“Did he fire missiles?” DeBiase asked.

“No. Machine gun or a cannon.”

“Okay. How many planes?”

“One.”

“Usually they work in pairs.”

“I only saw one, Jess.”

“Relax.”

“Don’t tell me to relax.”

“Listen, Mara. I’ve been in difficult situations myself. I can tell you from experience — ”

Mara didn’t hear the rest of what DeBiase said, not because it was a lecture about staying calm that she didn’t particularly need right now, but because when she looked up in exasperation, she saw four cone-hatted Vietnamese villagers staring down at her from the embankment. “Xin châo!” she said. “Hello.”

They didn’t answer. She tried thinking of the word for help, but couldn’t remember it.

“Ông, có biết iếng Anh không?” she said, addressing the oldest man and asking if he could speak English. That, too, brought only stares.

“He’s hurt,” she said in English, gesturing to Kieu. “Cáp cúu. Cúu hơa. “ They didn’t move.

“Mara?” said DeBiase.

“There are four Vietnamese farmers, I guess, standing here looking at me.”

“You used the word for fire brigade,” said DeBiase. “Tell them you need an ambulance. Xe cáp cú. “

“You really think they have ambulances out here?” she told him. But she repeated the words.

“Put me on with them,” he said. “My Vietnamese is better than yours.”

Mara held up the phone and gestured for them to take it. Instead, the men began talking to themselves. Then the youngest turned and began trotting away.

“Mara, what’s going on?” asked DeBiase.

“I’m not sure. Stay on the line.”

The three men continued to stare at her, their slack-jawed expressions similar to those Mara remembered from a photograph of people watching the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on store televisions. Behind them, Kieu’s aircraft had stopped burning; the black smoke that had followed the fire had dissipated. But the burnt smell still hung so thick in the air that Mara could taste it in her mouth.

“The Chinese shot down our plane,” Mara told the men. “They’re invading your country.”

One of the men turned to look behind him. Mara thought he had understood what she’d said, until he pointed and took a few steps away. The man who’d left a few moments ago was returning, with two teenage boys and a stretcher.

“We have to be careful,” she said in Vietnamese as they ran down the slope. “Careful.”

She put the phone back to her ear. “How do I say he may have a neck injury?” she asked DeBiase.

He gave her the words, then stayed on the line a few minutes more, until they had Kieu up the embankment. Worried that her battery would start to run down — the charger had been in her bag, left in the plane and presumably destroyed — Mara told DeBiase that she would check back with him in a half hour.

Hand pressed against Kieu’s neck, she walked next to the stretcher as they climbed up the slope and walked south to a barely discernible path at the edge of the field. The path twisted around thick clumps of trees, the jungle growing darker and darker until it seemed as if the sun had fallen. Finally, a pair of twists brought them to a clearing; a small village was visible at the far end.

The hamlet consisted of a dozen small huts and two farm buildings. All but one of the huts were made of bamboo topped by a thatched roof. The exception was made of scrap metal and wood; some of the slats at the front had originally come from vegetable boxes and still had markings on them. The farm buildings were made of corrugated steel. Yellowish red rust extended in small daggers from most of the screws and bolts holding them together; the roofs’ white coating was peeling, and large flakes fluttered in the soft breeze.

They took Kieu to a thatched hut at the very entrance to the settlement. The interior was larger than Mara had expected, and divided into several rooms. The front room functioned as a sitting room, with cushions scattered on the straw floor, and a brand-new Sony portable radio on a small table at the side. As Kieu and his stretcher were lowered, Mara knelt next to him, her hand still pressed against his wound.

An old man came in from one of the back rooms. Gaunt and tall, he had a sparse goatee and a wreath of very fine white hair starting at the temples. He bent over the stretcher, stared for a moment, then retreated without saying a word.

“Is he a doctor?” Mara asked the others, but they continued staring at her as if not yet sure she really existed.

The old man returned with a purple cloth bag. He set it down opposite Mara, then slowly lowered himself next to the stretcher. He took a blue bottle from the bag and opened it; a bitter smell immediately wafted through the room. The next thing he removed from the bag was a gauze pad wrapped in sterile paper; he pulled it open, daubed it with the clear liquid from the bottle, then reached with one hand to Mara’s and gently-pushed her fingers away from the shirt she’d used as a bandage. He pulled up the shirt, then began to clean the wound, very lightly at first, his strokes gradually growing longer and more forceful.

The wound was nearly two inches long, but very shallow. A black L sat at its center. At first Mara thought it was a bone, but as she looked she realized it must be the piece of shrapnel that had caused all the damage. The old man studied it, both with his eyes and the tips of his fingers, probing ever so gently. Then he took the bottle and tipped a bit of liquid into the wound.

Kieu jerked his body violently. The old man stopped pouring, waiting for him to settle. Then he poured again. Kieu jumped once more.

“You’re hurting him,” Mara said in Vietnamese.

There was no sign that the old man understood or even heard what she said. He capped the bottle, then opened his bag once more. He took out a small set of forceps.

“You’re not going to sterilize it?” asked Mara.

He ignored her. Bending over the wound, he lowered the tips of the forceps, maneuvering the instrument as he sized up how he would remove the metal. Then he sat back, and once more reached into the bag on his lap. This time he removed a Bic lighter and used it to heat the very end of the forceps.

When the metal glowed red, the old man took a very long breath, the sort one uses when meditating. Then he pointed at Kieu, motioning with his hands.

“You want me to hold him,” said Mara, using Vietnamese but miming to make sure she was understood.

The old man nodded. As soon as Mara’s hands were on Kieu’s shoulders, he scooped the forceps down, retrieving the shrapnel. Kieu screamed and bucked. Mara pushed her weight against his, easily holding him down, though there was no way to stop the awful sound coming from his mouth.

The old man cleaned and inspected the wound, which was bleeding again. He took new gauze, daubed it in his solution, and began soaking up the blood. As he did this with one hand, he reached with the other into his bag and removed a jar and a steel rod not unlike a knitting needle. Once again using his Bic lighter, he fired the edge of the rod and cauterized the wound, Kieu screaming the entire time. After dressing the wound with a large piece of gauze and tape, he moved on to the smaller one at Kieu’s back, just cleaning and bandaging this one.

Gesturing with his hand, the old man told Mara to roll Kieu over. The poor pilot screamed even louder, his feet jerking violently.

“Ssssh,” said the old man kindly, putting his hand under Kieu’s head. “Sssh.”

He took another bottle from his bag. He told Kieu something in Vietnamese that she couldn’t understand, then held the bottle to the wounded man’s lips. Kieu made a face and backed away. The old man held still for a moment, then pressed the bottle against his lips again. Kieu resisted; the old man tilted the bottle up and forced some of the liquid into his mouth. Then he clamped Kieu’s mouth closed, making him swallow.

Mara looked up. The men who had come here with her were gone; the room was empty except for her and the old man.

The old man lowered Kieu’s head back to the stretcher, then looked up at Mara. He pointed to her chest.

“What?” she said. Glancing down, she realized her shirt was soaked with blood. “It’s all from him. I’m fine.”

The old man stared at her, as if he didn’t believe what she was saying.

“It is. Look,” she said, unbuttoning the top button and pulling her shirt to the side. She didn’t feel like giving the old man a peep show, and stopped at her bra strap.

Her satellite phone rang in her pocket; she’d forgotten to call DeBiase back.

“Excuse me,” she told the old man, rising.

She was surprised to find a tight circle of children and older women gathered just outside the front door. She slipped through them, then walked the few yards toward the clearing before answering the phone.

“Are you all right?” DeBiase asked.

“I’m hanging in there. There’s some sort of local medicine man or doctor, I don’t know. He helped Kieu.”

The sound of jets streaking nearby split the air. Mara looked upward but couldn’t see them.

“What’s going on?” asked DeBiase.

“Jets going somewhere. Fighters.”

“Chinese?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have any means of transportation there?”

“I just got here, Jess. I don’t know.”

Mara turned back toward the village. It didn’t look like the sort of place where you’d find a car in every garage — especially since there weren’t any garages.

Maybe there were farm vehicles in the barns. Worst case, she could walk up to Nam Det.

“How far am I from Hanoi?” she asked.

“Almost two hundred kilometers. But distance isn’t the problem. The Chinese have launched a major offensive, Mara. They may be in Hanoi by tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“The way things are going, they may be there now.”

5

“R.32.14a — Traditional enemies. Start of the simulation. It’s right there.” Zeus Murphy tapped the keyboard, scrolling through the rule that allowed the game to start with an attack by “a traditional regional enemy.”

“Vietnam would never attack China,” said Christian. “That’s just not going to happen.”

“It’s not necessarily China,” said Rosen, who was suppressing a grin. “It’s Red Force.”

“Come on. First of all, the simulation calls for China to attack first — ”

“Wait a second — that’s not in the rules.”

“China always attacks.”

“But it’s not in the rules. Not specifically.”

“A Vietnamese attack would be suicide.”

“Not necessarily. And there’s plenty of historic precedence,” said Zeus. He turned toward Colonel Doner, who was standing at the head of the war room projection table. “Is it allowable?”

Doner furled his eyebrows, then glanced over at General Perry, whose expression mixed anger, frustration, and surprise. Before the general could say anything, Christian leaned back and whispered something to him. Perry shrugged. He was a short, skinny man; Christian towered over him. Still, Christian had adopted so many of his mannerisms that they looked like father and son.

Brow knotted, General Perry glanced over his right shoulder toward the smoked-glass panel of the observation room. The VIP Colonel Doner had mentioned was the assistant national security adviser/Asia, Sara Mai, who’d arrived at the base with three Pentagon handlers and a staff person who looked barely old enough to shave his pimple-filled face. Mai stood stiffly and nodded to Zeus when they were introduced, rather than extending her hand; Zeus guessed that her ice-cold manner had Perry confused.

“Oh, why not start out that way,” said the general. “If the young major wants to replay the Vietnam War, why not?”

Actually, the model Zeus had in mind was the 1979 conflict between China and Vietnam, which had ended in a confused stalemate. Not that he modeled his strategy on the conflict, which had seen China attack over the border in retaliation for Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.

On the contrary, he wanted China to attack in the west. And it did, launching a counterstrike in the tracks of the Vietnamese assault on the northwest border. That led Red to funnel its forces into the northwestern valleys near Cambodia and Laos, precisely what Zeus was counting on.

The situation ratcheted up quickly — Christian had obviously whispered that the Chinese could invade along the former Ho Chi Minh Trail, sweep into southern Vietnam, and force a quick Vietnamese surrender. Such a strategy made a great deal of strategic sense for Red, since it would position its forces to isolate Blue’s ally Thailand and provide a jumping-off point for the Malaysian oil fields, a high-point prize in the simulation.

But Zeus had no intention of letting Red get that far. Having identified several choke points where the Chinese advance could be slowed, he waged a series of campaigns along the Da River. The Vietnamese forces were overwhelmed each time, but Red had to spend considerable resources to gain those victories. Meanwhile, Zeus parceled out his meager American forces — two battalions of Special Forces and some SEALs — leveraging their effect. Fortunately, the rules provided that the special operations units increased in power and influence as the game went on.

The critical point came at Dien Bien Phu, as Red swung west on the open plain. Perry — and probably Christian, who was responsible for most of the general’s strategy — was clearly hoping to get the Vietnamese into a set-piece battle there, just as the North Vietnamese rebels had done to the French. Red even sent several units along the same route the French had taken, clearly trying to entice a North Vietnamese counterattack along the lines the great North Vietnamese general Giap had used. The difference, of course, was that the Red army was considerably larger than the force the French had had, and enjoyed overwhelming air superiority as well. Rather than trapping China as the North Vietnamese general had done to the French, the Vietnamese themselves would be swept up and overrun.

It wasn’t difficult to foresee this. What was tough was to make it seem as if he hadn’t. Zeus had Rosen feint all along the Da River and fall back toward Dien Bien Phu; at the same time, he maneuvered other units to make it seem as if he were rushing reinforcements. Perry attacked in force, and succeeded in taking Dien Bien Phu — but the Vietnamese army turned out to have only a hundred men in the area, and most of them escaped.

Then Zeus went for broke. He used his Special Force troops to lead an attack on Lao Cai, the border city at the head of the Hong River, well east of the Chinese breakthrough into Vietnam. Red began rushing forces south from Gejiu and east from Xin Jie to meet the new threat — only to have them cut off at critical river crossings by SEAL attacks on highway bridges obviously believed too far from Vietnam to warrant guarding. The Red army was now caught in two separate pockets, unable to defend against an all-or-nothing missile attack that used American ATACMS ground-to-ground missiles secretly brought to the Vietnamese in the early rounds of the simulation.

“Where did those friggin’ missiles come from?” said Christian as the attack unfolded on the simulation screen.

It was the high point of the session. Zeus didn’t have time to look up from the computer to see General Perry’s face, but he knew it wouldn’t be smiling. Red Force in Vietnam was now effectively cut off from its supply line; the army would have to be resupplied by air until Red could regain territory. That was doable — Red still had an overwhelming advantage over Vietnam — but it would take time. Enough time under the rules of the simulation that Blue had achieved a military stalemate without Red’s achieving any of its goals — in other words, a win for Blue, the first ever recorded in Red Dragon War Simulation Scenario 1.

Zeus expected General Perry to rush from the session before it ended just to miss the handshake that had come to mark the close. That had been Perry’s MO as Blue commander — he was a sore sport and sourpuss who hated to lose to a junior officer.

Or so Zeus thought. Not only did Perry stay this morning, but he gripped Zeus’s hand strongly, smiled, and congratulated him.

“Good work, Major. Good, good work,” he said before sweeping out of the room.

Christian looked like he’d been shot in the gut — a familiar look during the sessions. He shook tepidly, then followed his mentor.

“You got any fingers left?” asked Rosen as they secured their laptops.

“Perry’s got a hell of a grip,” said Zeus.

“A Mafioso grip. I’d watch my back.”

“He almost seemed happy.”

“Contemplating his revenge.”

“What’s he going to do?”

“You’ll know when your next assignment takes you to Partial, North Dakota.”

Zeus laughed. “Lunch?”

“Thought you’d never ask, sweetheart,” said Rosen in his best Humphrey Bogart voice.

His best wasn’t very good, but Zeus let it pass. Gear packed, he started out of the room, nearly bumping into Sara Mai.

“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said as she jerked backward.

One of her Pentagon escorts stopped short behind her, setting off a chain reaction of aides in the hallway. Under any other circumstances, it would have been hilarious, but Zeus felt the temperature in the entire basement suddenly shoot up.

“That’s all right, Major,” said Mai, straightening her skirt. Knee length, it was a blue pinstripe that matched her double-breasted top; if she’d had glasses, she would have looked like a stereotypical librarian. “That was quite an interesting performance. How often have you taken Blue’s position?”

“First time.”

“Interesting. Why focus on Vietnam?”

Zeus shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, I think you do, Major. It wasn’t an accident.” Her voice was harsh; she was scolding him, which made Zeus angry.

“You’re right. I considered it carefully.” He held her stare. Mai was only a few years older than he, with the slightest hint of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She was tall for a woman, five ten, though he still towered over her. “I needed a country China would attack. And one that I could use to stall for time. In that scenario, it’s the only way to win.”

“People playing the simulation for the first time normally defend Taiwan,” said Mai. “You left almost no forces there.”

“Yeah.”

“Why not?”

“I used what resources I had.”

He shrugged again. She was right — but how did she know?

Christian, probably. Trying to show off.

“Besides, China wasn’t going to attack there,” he said.

“No?”

“Doesn’t make strategic sense.” Zeus shook his head. “They wouldn’t in real life either. They see Taiwan the way they see Hong Kong. Estranged brothers who will return to the fold in time. They attack their enemies. Japan I could see. Vietnam looks weak. They’ll go right after Malaysia one of these days. I’m surprised they haven’t already.”

“So you picked Vietnam completely on your own?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because it was a traditional enemy and could attack?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve had no access to an outside telephone line since you reported for duty this morning?”

“Huh?”

“Have you made any phone calls, Major?” Mai’s tone was sharp, almost dismissive.

“No.”

“You haven’t used a phone?”

“There are no external lines downstairs because of security.” Zeus felt himself getting angry. “Listen — ”

“And your cell phone?”

“In my car,” he snapped. “Why?”

“I’d like you to come to Washington with me, Major.”

“Washington? Why?”

“Because roughly an hour ago, the Chinese invaded Vietnam. From what I’ve been told, their plan sounds very much like what you did today in the simulation. We leave in ten minutes.”

6

With Jing Yo’s men at the lead, the soldiers formed about a 250-meter search line and began walking through the jungle. It took them nearly an hour to work their way east into and then beyond the area where the enemy plane had been reported shot down. With no wreckage in sight, Jing Yo waited until they had gone about a kilometer beyond the point marked by Colonel Sun before calling a break. At that point, he conferred with Sergeant Wu and the regular army captain, Captain Lai Wi, to expand the search area.

The captain was still brooding from the way he had been treated, and sulked as Jing Yo went over the area with his handheld GPS device.

“We can move up the hill another half kilometer,” said Jing Yo. “At that point, we’ll reach a road. One group will pivot around on the north, the other on the south, and work back to the highway.”

“Three kilometers,” groused the captain.

“You don’t have to walk it with your men,” Jing Yo told him.

Captain Lai frowned, shook his head, then went off to see his sergeants.

“Bad case of red butt, huh?” said Sergeant Wu.

Jing Yo didn’t respond. It wasn’t his place to encourage disrespect for another officer, even if the officer was a jerk.

“You think we’ll find the plane?” asked Wu.

“If it went down here, we’ll find it.”

“You don’t think it went down here, though. Do you, Lieutenant?”

“I think it’d be fair to say that the coordinates we were given were in error,” answered Jing Yo.

Wu smirked.

“Let’s continue the search,” said Jing Yo, “since those are our orders.”

Sergeant Wu concealed a smile as he hiked back to his men. The lieutenant was a decent sort, not the stiff prig he’d taken him for initially. The decision to get rid of the jackass Fan had not been a fluke.

Sergeant Wu appreciated the fact that Jing Yo wouldn’t directly comment on orders he didn’t like — Sergeant Wu would have done the same with a subordinate. Order had to be maintained.

Of course, that theory barely applied to the stuck-up regular army captain whose troops they had commandeered. The captain wasn’t countermanding their orders — he was too much of a wimp to do that — but he wasn’t exactly helping the search effort either. He’d told his noncommissioned officers to check with him before carrying out the slightest “request” — his word — from the commandos, meaning that every time Sergeant Wu told them to do something, they had to check back with him. It was more a pain than anything else, since the captain was too cowardly — or realistically worried about his own behind — to do anything but rubber-stamp what Wu said. Still, it was an unnecessary bit of officer bullshit, which annoyed Wu no end.

The regular unit’s sergeants were sitting with Corporal Li and Private Ai Gua, sharing a pair of cigarettes that were being passed around commune-style. Ai Gua’s wrist, either sprained or broken in the accident the night before, was wrapped in a heavy bandage. The private had bruises up and down his side and leg. But he had not complained, nor asked to be relieved from duty as a regular soldier would have.

Excellent. So they had at least one real commando among the untested greenies in the platoon.

“Hey, are you ready to go?” barked Wu.

“Sergeant, you should hear the stories,” said Li, looking up from the log where he was sitting.

Wu put his hands on his hips.

“Their old man’s a drunk,” added Li.

“All right, that’s enough,” said Wu. “Lieutenant wants us to move on. Let’s do it.”

Li rolled his eyes but got up. Wu explained how the forces were to be divided, then sent the army sergeants off to check with their commander.

“Why are you so uptight?” asked Li.

By Wu’s light, the corporal had earned the right to question him by serving during the clandestine action two years before in Burma — but only just.

“Be thankful we don’t have their captain as our boss,” Wu told him.

“All officers are scum.”

“Most. Not Jing Yo.”

“Hmmmph. We’ll see.”

“He saved me from the truck,” said Ai Gua. “I think he’s a good commander.”

“That was his duty,” said Li. “As an officer. Besides, Granddaddy Wu would have grabbed you.”

“Most officers wouldn’t have rushed in,” said Wu. “They would have thought about it first.”

“He’s still young yet. We’ll see what happens when he’s a captain.”

Jing Yo took out his paper map as the troops began their sweep back toward the highway. The most galling thing about their mission wasn’t the fact that the plane probably hadn’t crashed anywhere near here; it was the fact that Colonel Sun moved them around completely at whim, changing plans that had been prepared months in advance simply because he wanted some friend in the antiaircraft artillery to get credit for shooting down the plane. That was Sun, always playing the politics of the situation, no matter what the costs to anyone else.

Jealousy.

Jing Yo took a slow breath, then hung his head, the reprimand of his mentors echoing in his head as loudly as if the monks were standing over him.

Jing Yo was jealous of Colonel Sun’s power. And as understandable as it might be, it was nonetheless an emotion that would cloud his judgment, keeping him from doing his duty.

He would do his duty. It was not his place to judge his superior officers. Doing so would make him just like Sergeant Fan.

Or worse, lead him down the path of dissolution, like the regular army captain.

Jing Yo swung to the south, moving among the regular army men, encouraging them as they walked. They were even less refined than the men whom he had been working with the past few days, though like them they were mostly poor farmers. Drafted from the northwest provinces and given a few weeks of rudimentary training, they were undoubtedly scared and awed by their task. Impressionable, they would follow even a bad leader — like their captain.

“Keep our eyes open, now!” he called as he walked up behind them. “Keep our separation. Good work, Sergeant. There, Private, stay alert! “

He walked back and forth across the line for the next hour, until finally the road was once more in sight. Jing Yo ordered the soldiers to rest, then called Colonel Sun to tell him that the search had not produced a downed plane.

“What are you doing up there still?” said Sun as soon as his communications man put him through. “The air force downed the plane to the east. Get your men back in the line.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Wait, Jing Yo — you have regular troops searching with you?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Have them continue searching. Just in case. You get your men down to Lai Chau as planned. We’re making good time. We need to stay on schedule.”

“Yes, sir.”

Josh felt both his anger and his hunger grow as the hours went on. In the meantime, it seemed as if all China were flooding over the border. Occasionally he caught glimpses of men on the tanks, but for the most part all he could see was gray and green steel passing. The engines drowned out any sounds he made himself; he felt almost invisible.

But he realized he was in grave danger when two men suddenly materialized a few yards from him. His attention had been fixed on the road to his left, and by the time he saw them push into the woods farther north on his right, they were too close for him to run.

He held his breath as they walked closer, then stopped. For a moment he thought they had spotted him. Then he realized they had only come to relieve themselves. As soon as they were done, they ran back toward the road.

Even as he retreated farther into the jungle, Josh berated himself — he could have tackled them for their guns. He had to start thinking long term if he was going to get back.

He had to get back. He was going to tell the world what the Chinese were doing.

It had been the Chinese who’d massacred the scientists and the village. Josh had realized it as he watched the tanks rolling. The Chinese had probably sent advance units in to make sure there would be no alarm or resistance. Their orders had undoubtedly been to kill anyone they found.

It was the only thing that made sense — even though it didn’t make sense at all. But what war did?

He had to get out. That meant he had to find a weapon.

Josh walked away from the road in as straight a line as he could manage. At times he heard small animals running through the brush as he approached, but he never saw any. Even the frogs seemed shy — they quickly leapt away as he approached, showing only glimpses of their legs.

The terrain ran uphill, and after about a half hour he began moving farther south to avoid the hardest climb. Finally he stopped to rest. Without planning to, he fell asleep against a tree.

A spider walking across his hand a few minutes later woke him up. He jumped, shaking his hand furiously, unnerved by the tickling sensation. Body shaking, he grabbed his arms, hugging his chest and looking around to get his bearings. Josh wasn’t ordinarily afraid of spiders, and when he finally got hold of himself he laughed — softly — mocking his fear.

Can’t eat spiders, he told himself, setting out again.

He’d gone about fifty yards, perhaps a little more, when he heard sounds in the jungle to his left. He couldn’t tell what was going on at first — the sounds were too faint. Then he saw brush moving in the distance. He started to back up. Thinking it was an animal coming toward him, he glanced around for something to use as a weapon — this might be a chance at food. He saw a rock about the size of his fist and grabbed it, then continued backward, perpendicular to the animal’s path.

What was it? Something green.

A man. A soldier.

Josh froze as he saw the rifle slung over the soldier’s shoulder. Slowly he sank to his haunches, watching as the man walked. He was about ten yards away, poking at the brush with a stick as he moved forward. His eyes were fixed on the ground in front of him.

Ten yards was close enough to be seen, but not close enough to attack the man with any guarantee of surprise. Josh remained where he was, willing the man past.

The man whacked at the large leaves in front of him. He was talking to himself, singing maybe, shaking his head, looking at the ground, only occasionally looking up to see where he was going.

Josh looked at the rock, still in his hand. One side was smooth; the other, jagged. It didn’t weigh very much.

He could come up behind the soldier, hit him on the head, take his gun, shoot him.

But there must be others. A soldier wouldn’t walk alone through the woods.

Josh remained still, seeing himself charging up behind the man. He heard something in the distance — another soldier, walking about ten yards farther south, calling to his companion.

The soldier who’d already passed kept moving without answering.

I can take one of them, Josh told himself. But not both.

The man called out again. He was walking on a diagonal, in Josh’s direction.

Maybe this was the man to take.

No. This one was more alert. He wasn’t hitting the brush with a stick. He kept looking around.

Josh closed his fist around the rock, then pounded his other palm with it. He had to think long range. He had to think survival.

Don’t be a coward, he told himself. This is your chance. You need a rifle if you’re going to survive.

Was it a chance? Or was it suicide?

The man wasn’t wearing a helmet. Hit him in the head and he would go down quickly.

He might be one of the men who had killed the villagers. He might be — he was one of the men who had killed his friends, his colleagues, on the expedition.

True or not, it didn’t matter. Josh began moving forward. His body shrank slightly, slinking closer to the jungle floor. His legs and arms lengthened, the limbs of a cat, preparing to strike.

“Nihao?” said the soldier, asking if anyone was there. “Nihao?”

Josh sprang.

The soldier heard the noise behind him. Thinking it was his friend, he started to spin around. The rifle was in his hands, across his chest.

Josh hit him square in the forehead with the rock. It didn’t seem to do anything. It did nothing — all his strength and he hadn’t even moved the man.

He was going to die. Here, in the middle of the jungle, like an animal, this was how he would die.

His anger exploded. He wasn’t a cat now; he was a volcano, he was fire, he was violence itself. Josh smashed the soldier’s forehead once, twice, a third time — blood splattered everywhere. He smashed it again. He threw his body forward and he hit hard, harder than he had ever hit anything in his life. Again. Another time. He hit the splatter of blood that had been the man’s face. He saw something gray, was sure it was the man’s brain spurting out.

Josh punched the man’s jaw with his fist, the rock still held tightly in his hand. Then he leapt up, grabbed the rifle, and began to run, sure someone had heard, sure he was going to be shot at any second.

He ran until his breath gave out, then pushed himself for a few more strides until finally he threw his arm out and caught himself around a tree. He had a stitch in his side, a sharp pain from muscles not used to such exertion.

He’d just killed a man. He should feel bad. And yet he didn’t. He didn’t feel good — he didn’t feel anything.

He had the gun. The next thing he needed was food.

A map maybe.

What had happened to the other man? Was he following him?

As Josh waited for his breath to become regular again, he looked up at the sky, trying to judge direction by the position of the sun. He needed to go southeast, in the general direction of Hanoi.

Not that he’d be able to walk to Hanoi.

He could if he had to. He would.

Josh gripped the rifle, ready to shoot the man’s friend. But no one came. There were no shouts, no alarms, no cries for help. It was as if nothing had happened.

But it had. The gun proved it. And the blood on his clothes.

Josh began walking. He went at a good pace for another half hour, perhaps forty-five minutes, before starting to tire. He was oblivious of the fatigue at first. Then the rock slipped from his hand. He hadn’t even realized he’d still been holding it.

He crouched down, hoping that by doing that he would avoid falling asleep as he had last time. His nose was starting to act up and he debated taking one of his pills. Finally he decided to risk one of the lighter ones and reached into his pocket for the pillbox.

His hand shook as he opened it. He had only four left — one white, small dose, three green ones. He picked the lighter pill out with his thumb and forefinger, but as he reached for his mouth it slipped from his grip.

Then he sneezed, dropping the case.

Josh went down his hands and knees, patting for the pills on the ground. He found only one — a white one, fortunately. He swallowed, ignoring the bitter aftertaste. Then he hunted some more, until finally he realized it was hopeless, and gave up.

He continued up the hill, his steps becoming shorter and more labored. He spotted a waterfall in the distance ahead, and made it his goal. It wasn’t until he reached it, some ten or fifteen minutes later, that Josh realized it wasn’t a waterfall, or at least it wasn’t now. Erosion from the seasonal storms had carved a sluice down the slope, but without a hard, steady rain the stream was dry. There was no water.

To his left, a ravine dropped into a cultivated field; Josh could see its edge through the trees.

If there was a field, there would be a village. He could get food there.

Steal food. He couldn’t trust anyone now. He’d check it out once night came.

Josh sat on the rocks that had formed the crest of the waterfall and studied the gun he’d taken. He’d handled plenty of rifles and shotguns on his uncle’s farm, but this was unlike anything he’d ever used before. It seemed to be made largely of plastic, which contributed to its odd feel in his hands. Its banana clip was located behind the trigger, bullpup style, something he knew was possible though had never seen. It had a large, M16-like carrying handle at the top, with a lever he surmised was the charging handle beneath it. The ejection port sat at the right side; fortunately he was right-handed.

He put the gun across his lap and peered down into the jungle. The friend of the man he’d killed was still out there somewhere, probably looking for him by now. There were bound to be many others as well.

Josh felt a twinge in his stomach — fear, regret that he had made the wrong choice.

I’ll just kill them all, he told himself. That’s what I’ll do.

The idea floated through his head, something foreign, not too theoretical to take hold.

Captain Lai’s frustration had ebbed somewhat since the commandos had left them to conduct the search themselves. He was glad to be rid of the lieutenant and his smart-mouthed sergeant; they were a clear threat to his authority. The search mission had seemed like a waste of time from the beginning, but it was a relatively easy task; he didn’t have to worry too much about his men, who he knew had been poorly trained. That wasn’t his fault — he’d joined the unit only a few weeks before — but he would surely catch the blame if they did poorly in battle.

Lai scrolled his arms together, trying to ward off the thirst that was always with him. He had not had alcohol for over two months, and he knew he would not have it now — he had made very sure not to bring any with him. But the urge was extremely strong, a desire beyond emotion that rose from every part of his body.

He craved the warm honey of the first sip as it spread from his mouth to every muscle and organ. He could taste the wholeness it brought, the way the alcohol — any alcohol, at this point — filled the other half of his soul, a complementary yin.

But he would not have any today, or any day for that matter. He would get through today, and the next one, as his counselor advised.

It was torture.

Lai turned abruptly, realizing that one of his sergeants was staring at him.

“Captain, the units are too spread out. We have many stragglers.”

“Then get them together,” said Lai.

“We’ll have to stop the search, sir.”

Lai waved dismissively. “Do it,” he said.

The sergeant bowed his head, and moved to spread the word.

Lai took his satellite radio from his belt and called division headquarters. Instead of getting the communications clerk, he was connected immediately to Major Wang, the chief of staff. He explained the situation, saying that he would need transportation when the search was completed.

“You should have stayed away from the commando,” said the major. “I told you earlier, once you are attached to anything Colonel Sun does, you are as good as dead to us.”

“I did try to,” said Lai. “I told him I had other orders. But he wouldn’t listen.”

“You’re an idiot if you think that is enough.”

Wang asked about transport.

“Did Sun release you?” asked Wang.

“I need to talk to him?”

“Did he release you?”

Lai was forced to answer that he had not.

“Then you will continue on the mission until you hear from me. I will see what I can do.” But don’t count on miracles, suggested Wang’s voice. “Really, the best thing you must do, from now on — is to stay away from the commando. From any commando.”

Wonderful advice, thought Lai as he returned the radio to his belt. But he wasn’t the one who had placed his unit so close to the spearhead of the attack in the first place.

“I’m going to scout up the way here,” he said aloud, though none of his men were nearby. “I’m going to find a good place for a command post.”

He hated the army. But it was his penance — if he had not drunk so much as a young man, his father would never have insisted that he join. He would be working now in the company with his brother.

The army could be a terrific opportunity for the right man. The right man could make use of the power and connections it afforded to advance. Even now, with the hard economic times, the right man in the army had less trouble than most.

Lai, however, wasn’t the right man.

Perhaps he could be. If he got through today.

The captain walked slowly uphill through the jungle, picking his way through the trees as they began to thin out. The vegetation amazed him. Much of southern China, where he’d spent the last lonely year and a half, was arid wasteland. Yet here, only a few kilometers over the border, plants of all sorts grew with abandon.

It was as if there were a curse on Chinese land. Or maybe the Americans and their agents had poisoned the Chinese countryside secretly, perhaps years or even decades before. The American war with Vietnam could easily have been just a pretext; while the two countries pretended to be at arm’s length now, everyone knew the Vietnamese were simply monkeys in the West’s employ. That was the way the Americans operated — lazy themselves, they got someone else to do the work for them.

As he started picking his way around the rocks, the captain heard a pair of voices talking in the distance below. Their voices were hushed — so soft, in fact, that at first he thought he was imagining them. He held his breath, listening as carefully as he could.

They were real voices, he decided: men talking about something back at home, talking about a son, a newborn, a child he had had to leave.

Lai took a tentative step in their direction, moving quietly. As far as he knew, there were no other units in the area. But the men had to be Chinese — they were speaking Chinese.

Right until the moment he saw them, sitting on the ground against a large rock not twenty yards from where he had climbed up, the captain refused to believe that they were his soldiers. His entire unit should have been in front of him, stretched out through the jungle conducting the search. To find two men huddled here, far from where they were supposed to be and goofing off besides — the idea did not even seem possible.

And yet it was. They were so engrossed in their own conversation and the cigarettes they were smoking that they didn’t hear him until he was only a meter or two away. By then it was too late — the captain pushed aside a large fern and stood two arm’s lengths away.

“Captain!” said the man on the right, jumping up.

Startled, his companion jerked to his feet as well. As he did, he dropped a phone he’d been holding.

Incensed, Lai reached to his belt and took out his pistol.

“You have disobeyed your orders,” he told them, struggling to control his emotions. The words sputtered from his mouth, his anger twisting his tongue. “What are you doing here?”

“Captain, we needed a rest and — ”

“Silence!” Lai pointed the pistol at them. “You rest when you are given the order to rest. What’s that mobile phone doing?”

Neither man spoke. Mobile phones and other communications devices were strictly prohibited to most of the Chinese army; even an officer like Lai was not allowed a personal phone and had to account strictly for his use of the satellite radio.

“The cell phone!” repeated Lai. He pointed the gun at the man who had dropped it.

“Captain, it is a satellite phone,” stuttered the man. “It doesn’t — it-it —.” He cut himself off in midsentence and dropped to his knees, begging for his life.

The captain’s anger only grew. He extended his arm, the pressure growing in his finger to fire. Finally, he did — and only a last-second force of will pushed the aim of the barrel straight up, sending the bullet harmlessly into the sky.

“Why do you have the phone?” said Lai after the shot finished echoing against the hillside.

The man on his knees could not respond, so Lai looked at his companion.

“We — we found it, c-clearing the d-dead with the commandos. Y-yesterday. It doesn’t work, Captain. There is a code — it won’t come to life. He just wanted to talk to his wife about his n-new son.”

“The commandos took satellite phones?”

For a brief moment, Lai’s spirit soared — here was something he could use to get back not just at the uppity lieutenant who had commandeered his men, but at Colonel Sun himself. But the look on the private’s face quickly brought him back to earth.

“They d-d-didn’t see,” answered the private. “We — ”

“Weren’t you ordered not to take anything?” asked the captain, not quite ready to give up the possibility of revenge.

“Y-y-yes.”

“Get down the hill both of you,” Lai told them. “Find your sergeant and find your right places in the search. Go. Go now! Before I change my mind!”

The man who had fallen to his knees now dropped on his face, tears flowing from his eyes in gratitude. He began to babble about his son — the newborn they had apparently been speaking of earlier — and how the captain’s name would be added to the child’s.

“Go!” said Lai sharply.

The other man dragged him down the hill.

Lai waited until they were out of his sight, then picked up the phone. His first thought was to chuck it into the trees. But someone might find it there, and it would easily be traced back to his unit. If he was going to dispose of it, he would have to find a much better place.

Maybe there was still a way to use it to discredit the commandos. Perhaps an idea would occur to him. He tucked it into his belt and began walking back to the crest of the hill.

Lai would have been fully within his rights as captain to execute both men. If anything, it was his decision to show the men mercy that might be questioned. They had not only disobeyed his orders for conducting the search, but disobeyed general orders in possessing the phone — a much graver matter.

He was fairly certain that neither man would speak of the incident, but if they did, Lai might get the reputation of being a “soft” commander, and one who did not care whether his orders were followed or not.

Being a drunk was not necessarily something that would bar one’s promotion; being soft was.

He hated the army.

Josh had been sitting on the rock for nearly an hour when he heard the soldier making his way up through the jungle toward him. His first thought was that he had been surrounded, and that the man below was trying to flush him out. Then he realized that was unlikely. Whoever he was hearing was moving slowly, not walking directly toward him but following the channel the water had made.

Josh slipped off the rock and moved to a nearby cluster of chest-high bushes, ducking behind them.

The soldier’s head appeared above the rocks. He climbed up onto the rock where Josh had been sitting, then leaned back, resting.

Josh sprang forward. He started to bring the rifle up to use as a club, but the man began turning in his direction.

Josh lowered the rifle and slid his finger into the trigger.

He saw the surprise on the man’s face, then the little geysers of dust rising from the rock next to the soldier, then from the soldier himself.

Gray dust from the rock. Red from the soldier.

The man looked up into his face and started to say something, his chubby lips opening into a question. Then he fell back into the dried streambed.

Josh ran to him, and stared down at his face. There was no expression on it now, just a kind of numb emptiness, the eyes staring without comprehension.

The man had had a satellite phone in his hand. As he picked it up, Josh realized it was an AsiaSat2 unit, the same type that the expedition had used.

Josh’s anger erupted. He went back to the body and stomped on the dead man’s face with his heel, fury unleashed in a violent surge that left him physically drained after only a few seconds. Still he kept stomping, kicking the man for what seemed like hours.

When he stopped, he didn’t feel any pleasure; he felt no satisfaction or even justification. He felt only trembling exhaustion.

The gunshot would have been heard for several miles, and others would be reacting. He wasn’t going to be lucky like he had been before. This man had an insignia — he was an officer. People would care about him. They would look for him, and want revenge.

Josh had to get out of here — now.

He bent down to see if the man had anything useful. There was a pistol on his belt, and a canteen — Josh jerked the canteen free and drained about a quarter of it in a single gulp. Coughing, he stopped and caught his breath, then took another drink, slower, more measured — the water had a metal taste, though not nearly bad enough to make him spit it out.

Capping the steel bottle, he stood silently for a moment, listening.

There was nothing. It was as if he and the Chinese soldier had been the only two people in the world, and now it was just him.

A dangerous illusion. They would be running to see what the shots were. He had to get as far away from here as he could. Then he could use the phone to call for help.

Josh put the water bottle in his left pocket, then hiked his jeans and tucked the pistol into the front of his waistband. Glancing at his battered boots, he started climbing back over the ridge, rifle ready.

7

Peter Lucas leaned back in the chair, reaching for his bottle of water as the Air Force intelligence officer began reviewing the satellite data on the Chinese attack for the rest of the participants in the videoconference. Lucas had seen most of this intelligence an hour ago. Gathered from a pair of electronic “ferret” or signal eavesdropping satellites that had been moved into the area, the data indicated a huge jump in traffic on bands associated with a cross section of the Chinese military. In layman’s terms: the Chinese were streaming over the border like lava from a volcano.

An admiral from PACOM spoke next, saying that the Navy had no ships closer than a full day’s sail from the coast of Vietnam, and it would take several days to get anything bigger than a destroyer there. A P-3 Orion had been scrambled to cover the coast, looking for Chinese submarines, but at the moment that was the extent of the Navy’s effort in the area. If American citizens were going to be evacuated from Vietnam —

“My God, we don’t want photos like that,” blurted Harold Park. As the CIAs director of operations or DDO, he was the number two man in the agency. He was a good DDO, and an even better agency politician.

Which was good for Lucas, unless he somehow ended up as designated scapegoat if things went terribly wrong.

People escaping from the roof of the U.S. embassy would qualify. But so would a lot of other things — most of which they probably couldn’t think of.

“At the rate the Chinese are moving, they’ll reach Lai Chau by nightfall,” said Sara Mai, the deputy national security director for South Asia. She was speaking from a plane, and while the connection was clear, there was a low hum whenever she spoke, the noise-canceling gear not quite successful in cutting out the sound of the engines.

“That’s if they don’t turn east and go to the river,” said the chief of staff, Army General Clayton Fisk. “Which they can also reach by then.”

“We don’t believe they’ll turn east,” said Mai.

“Really? You have data to back that up?”

“We’re working on a theory — ”

“Data,” repeated Fisk, using the tone he would have used to browbeat an underling. Lucas always pictured Fisk chewing on a cigar — he had the jowls of a bulldog, and that pretty much described his manner.

“We’re looking at the same intelligence you are,” answered Mai sharply.

Walter Jackson, the national security adviser and Mai’s boss, stepped in to quash the argument before it started.

“Tom, do you have anything new for us?” he said, talking to Thomas Mengzi, the deputy head of the CIA’s Chinese station. Mengzi was sitting in for Michael Dalton, who’d flown to Russia two days before and was still in Moscow.

“Just more of what I said at the top,” Mengzi told Jackson. “The Chinese say they were attacked. They claim there’s plenty of evidence. Rumor has it we caught it on satellite.”

“We do have some images,” said the Air Force analyst. “There were troop trucks. Hard to tell at this moment if they were Vietnamese, though they seem to have come out of the country.”

Has to be a setup, thought Lucas, though he didn’t say it.

“All right. Thank you all for the update,” said Jackson, who as national security adviser had chaired the session. “We’ll reconvene for a fresh update at 2100 Washington time.”

Lucas stayed on the line, waiting for Park to come back.

“You wanted a word, Peter?” asked the DDO, his face flashing on the screen. Either the camera or the technology subtly altered the shape of his face, making it even rounder than it was in person.

“One of my people was in a plane that was shot at by the Chinese air force and forced to land,” said Lucas. “She’s okay. But she’s stranded up near the border.”

“I see.”

“I’d like to take her out.”

“How?”

“I haven’t settled on the exact plan.”

“She? Who is it?”

“Mara Duncan. The PM who was reassigned out of Malaysia. I needed someone clean to contact our Belgian friend. He didn’t show. She went looking for him.”

“The wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I guess it depends on your perspective. She’s the one that first told us the Chinese were definitely over the border. Her information came at least an hour before the satellites picked anything up.”

Park wasn’t impressed. “Where exactly is she?”

“Nam Det. We ran that operation into Xin Jie, China, from there a few months ago.”

Park nodded but said nothing.

“I’m pretty confident we can get an airplane onto the field,” said Lucas when the silence grew too long.

“Not under these circumstances.”

“I can’t leave her there.”

Park didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

“All right,” said Lucas finally. “That’s all I have right now.”

The screen blanked. Lucas took a swig from his water, then unlocked the door and went outside to the small lounge area, grabbing a cup of coffee before proceeding down the hall to Secure Room 1, where Jesse DeBiase was coordinating the efforts to wring as much intelligence as possible from the various sponges and stones the CIA had planted throughout Southeast Asia over the past decade.

“How we doing, Million Dollar Man?” asked Lucas.

“We’re doing. Very slowly. Nothing real to report. The Vietnamese still don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

“That’s the assessment there?”

“That’s my assessment. I don’t trust Hanoi. But yes, when you pick through what they said.”

DeBiase knew all about the situation there. He was, in fact, Lucas’s first choice to become the new station chief — though he clearly didn’t want the job.

“And what do our people say?”

“They think the real attack is going to come in the east. Probably that’s the majority view of the government as well. Like I say, they’re so confused they don’t know which way is up.” DeBiase wheeled his seat forward a few inches. “Who’s going for Mara?”

Lucas grimaced, and pulled over a chair.

“We’re leaving her there?” said DeBiase.

“I don’t know what we’re doing. Park doesn’t want us sending anyone into the area.”

“We can’t leave her.”

“Just because she’s a woman, Jesse, doesn’t mean she can’t take care of herself.”

Lucas turned the screen on the computer next to DeBiase, and started paging through the recent communications.

“Seriously, what are we going to do?” asked DeBiase.

“Seriously, I don’t know. I’ve been told we’re not allowed to run any operations in Vietnam.” Lucas kept his eyes fixed on the screen, partly in hopes of reading something that would give him an idea of what precisely he should do.

“Peter, we can’t leave her on her own up there. Her Vietnamese is patchy. She has no equipment. God knows how banged up she is after the plane crash. She was never supposed to be in that area in the first place. If the Chinese find her, she’ll be taken prisoner. The Vietnamese will do the same thing.”

Lucas continued paging through the data, which was an unfiltered hodgepodge of reports, ranging from NSA intercept summaries to second- and thirdhand accounts sent via instant message to CIA officers around the world. The real trick wasn’t getting information — there was tons of it here. It was organizing it into a coherent shape. And the more there was, the harder that became.

“It doesn’t look like they’re heading in her direction,” Lucas said finally. “It looks from this that they’re going directly south.”

“She’s not all that far from Lao Cai.”

“Far enough.”

“Peter, we can’t leave her there.”

“I’ll talk to her,” said Lucas. “Then I’ll figure out how we’ll get her.” “She’s supposed to call in another hour.”

“I don’t want to wait. Call her now.”

“She turned her phone off to conserve the batteries.”

“Sounds like Mara,” said Lucas. “Always thinking ahead.”

8

Josh crossed over the ridge and walked for at least an hour before taking the satellite phone from his pocket. The delay was an act of will, a test to see if he could withstand temptation — to demonstrate to himself that he had the mental toughness he needed to survive. Because to survive, he could not give in to temptation, and he suspected that there would be many more instances of temptation before he reached safety. So he left the phone in his pocket as he walked south, skirting the edge of the fields he’d seen earlier, moving parallel to the hilltops until finding a dry streambed gouged into the hill.

A cluster of half a dozen houses sat in the lap of two hills between the terraced fields. Josh skirted it, walking deeper into the jungle. He’d have to stay away from the settlements, at least during the day; anyone pursuing him would search there first. With water and a gun, he could wait until nightfall to get food.

He would wait. He would do what he had to do to survive.

South of the village, surrounded by thick jungle, Josh finally allowed himself to examine the phone. There were no markings on it, but he was convinced it was one of the team’s. It looked exactly like his — so much so that only when his personal ID didn’t unlock it was he sure it wasn’t.

The model was designed so that it wouldn’t turn on unless its owner’s identification code was entered properly. But it came from the factory with a default code. Josh wondered if maybe its owner hadn’t changed it. Most people, he’d heard, didn’t bother.

But what had the code been? He seemed to remember that it had been four similar digits. He tried the 0’s, then 1’s. Neither worked. 2’s, 3’s — he went through all of the digits without unlocking it.

It had to be one of those. Maybe if he took the battery out, the memory would die and the code would reset.

Josh tried it, then hit 0-0-0-0. Again he got a PIN failed message. He tried 1-1-1-1.

“Locked,” flashed on the screen.

He snapped the red Off button, angry.

Stay in control, he told himself. With or without the phone, you’ll get out of here. With or without it.

Sliding the phone into his pocket, he began walking again. It was starting to get dark. He had trouble seeing until he stumbled onto a narrow dirt trail, nearly falling as he pushed past some brush. He took a quick step back, looking left and right to make sure no one was nearby. Not trusting his eyes, he remained motionless a while longer, listening for any sound. Finally satisfied, he turned to the left and began walking along the edge of the path, moving as quietly as he could.

The trail seemed to meander almost without purpose or direction. He began stopping at every turn, peeking forward around a tree or thick bush, sure he was going to spot a village just ahead. But there was nothing.

Gradually, Josh began to relax. He picked up his pace. Finally, perhaps two kilometers after starting on the path, he smelled the faint odor of a fire in the distance. A few minutes later, he smelled food.

I’ll stop here now, he told himself. I’ll find a place to hide until nightfall. Then I’ll go and see what I can find of use in the village.

Food.

He didn’t want to get too close to whatever village the food was being cooked at — if he was too close, his hunger might take over and he would do something stupid. He walked for a good ten minutes before finding a good place to stop, a low niche in an embankment formed by large tree roots along the side of the trail. The shadows would hide him completely, yet he’d still be able to see the trail. He climbed into the spot, a bird stealing another’s nest.

Josh took a sip of water. The sky had been clear; once the moon came out, there would be plenty of light to see by. Sneaking into the village would be easy. Getting inside one of the huts might be a little harder — he’d have to do it without being heard, difficult in their small houses.

Was that what had happened in the village he’d been in? Maybe the Chinese hadn’t killed the people at all — maybe it had been someone as desperate to survive as he was.

No. The entire village had not only been killed; they’d been buried. He knew what he had seen, and he had the proof in his pocket.

Josh arched his back, slipping his hand into his pocket for the satellite phone. He turned it on again, different number combinations running through his head.

As the device powered up, a message flashed briefly on the screen: emergency service only. The phone was set to dial an emergency number, whether its account was open or not.

Yes! But what was it? 7-0-7? 1-1-2?

God, he couldn’t remember. He could picture the session in Tokyo where Dr. Renaldo’s assistant Tracey told them how to use the phones, but he couldn’t remember the number.

God, she was beautiful.

She’d gone only as far as Tokyo. He remembered wishing she was coming; now he was glad she hadn’t.

Josh tried the first combination that came into his head.

CONNECTED.

Connected!

He stared at the phone, not quite believing it. By the time he got it to his ear, the operator was asking what the nature of his call was.

The man had a British-Malaysian accent.

“My name is Josh MacArthur. Dr. Joshua MacArthur,” he said, using the honorific though he had not been given the degree yet, hoping it would make him sound more important. “I am working for the UN. I’m in Vietnam. The Chinese have just invaded across the border. They attacked us. They killed everyone in the expedition. I’m a few kilometers, no more than ten, from the base camp. Maybe less than ten. I don’t know. There was a village nearby. They attacked it. Murdered civilians. I have video. It’s — it’s pretty disgusting.”

Josh stopped speaking. The operator hadn’t said anything, not even “Go on” or “Yes” or “You’re out of your mind.” He listened for a moment, trying to hear breathing on the other side.

“Are you there?” asked Josh.

There was no answer.

“Are you there? I’m with the UN. We need help.”

Josh fought to keep the desperation from his voice, but it was impossible.

“Are you there? Operator? This is an emergency. Operator?”

The phone claimed it was connected, but Josh couldn’t hear anything. It was as if the line had been cut.

Had there really been an operator? Or had he imagined it?

“Hello? Hello?” he repeated. “I’ll hang up and dial again.”

He hesitated, then pressed the red button.

Don’t panic, he told himself. But his fingers trembled as he redialed.

The word connected came on the screen again. But this time, there was no answer from the operator, just more quiet.

“This is Josh MacArthur. I’m with the UN. We’ve been attacked in northwestern Vietnam. We need help. Can you hear me? Hello? Hello?…”

There was nothing in response, not even a signal telling him he had misdialed. The line didn’t even seem dead. It was more like a vacuum, sucking sound away: a static-free limbo.

Josh hit the End Call button.

Whom else could he call?

His uncle in Iowa.

He punched in the numbers and hit Send. But this time the phone didn’t connect at all — it was still in emergency mode.

Whatever was going on must be affecting the phones. Dejected, Josh stuck the phone in his pocket and gazed back at the trail, struggling to separate the shadows into those that were real, and those his mind invented.

9

The settlement where Mara and the wounded Vietnamese pilot Kieu had been taken was so small that there were no televisions; the nearest was in the marginally larger Nam Det, about two kilometers up the road. With Kieu resting and seemingly in good care, Mara decided to go there and see if she could get news from the wider world. One of the young men who had carried the stretcher was appointed to be her guide, and they set out just as it was turning dark.

The Vietnamese knew that something serious was happening. They’d seen the MiG overhead and heard the gunfire that had led to the crash and explosion. But they didn’t seem overly curious about the situation. They made no attempt to ask Mara what was going on. She supposed curiosity was not a good characteristic in a dictatorship. Still, she knew no good ever came from closing one’s eyes to trouble, and found herself asking her escort what he thought was going on as they walked to Nam Det.

He didn’t answer. Mara wasn’t sure whether he didn’t understand what she was saying — she was still struggling with the language’s tones and accent — or whether he had been instructed not to say anything. She tried again, a little louder, pretending there was a possibility that he hadn’t heard.

Again he said nothing.

“Am I saying the words wrong?” she said.

“Your pronunciation need work,” said the young man in English.

“You speak English,” replied Mara, also in English.

“We learn in school.”

“So what do you think?”

“Think?”

“About the Chinese attack. Aren’t you curious? Do you think it’s true?”

“If you say those were Chinese planes, why wouldn’t I believe you?” He seemed genuinely surprised that she would think he didn’t.

“Are you going to defend your country?”

“I am not in the army.”

“Are you going to join?”

“If the government tells me to join, then I will be in the army.”

“I would think — I know if America was attacked, I would want to join the army.”

“You are not in the army?”

“I’m a journalist,” said Mara, reverting to her cover story.

The young man nodded, but he didn’t seem convinced. Probably like Kieu, he assumed she worked for the CIA.

“What do you do now?” Mara asked. “What work?”

“We farm.”

“You?”

“Me, yes.”

“And you still go to school? You studied English — are you going to move to Hanoi or Saigon when you graduate?”

The young man explained that the school was more like an American grammar school, and that students there learned French and English by the time they were twelve. At that time, they also generally went to work in their village, which was what he had done. He had not been in a schoolroom for several years.

“It is not like in the south,” said the young man, who still hadn’t volunteered his name. “Some of the older people — many of the older people — don’t think we should learn English. But it is a necessary language.”

“What about Chinese?”

The young man smiled, reeling off a few Chinese phrases so quickly Mara couldn’t decipher them all, though her Chinese was somewhat better than her Vietnamese. It seemed amazing that someone with what amounted to a middle-school education could speak four different languages, but the young man assured her it was not unusual. The Vietnamese people were willing to work hard, he said, to “advance in knowledge.”

The young man took her to a house that belonged to his uncle, who was one of the village elders. It was larger than the hut where she’d left Kieu, with more furniture and possessions, but there was no mistaking it for a rich man’s home. The only signs of prosperity — indeed, the only things in the house that would not have been there fifty years before — were a refrigerator, which stood against the wall in the front room, and the television, which stood opposite it. The TV and refrigerator could not be on at the same time; her interpreter’s uncle ordered the refrigerator cord pulled from the wall before plugging in the television. The two lights in the room blinked as the set was turned on.

Mara waited while the picture came up. A picture of dancers dressed in elaborate costumes appeared; they twirled their skirts across the screen.

“A cultural show,” said the young man.

The uncle changed the channel. An Indian movie, dubbed into Vietnamese, appeared.

“Is there a news channel?” Mara asked.

They put on the “official” government station — the others, though heavily censored and owned by the government, were officially “unofficial.”

It was showing a travelogue on Ho Chi Minh City.

“There has to be some news,” said Mara. She asked how the signal came to the sets and learned it was supplied by a satellite. “Can we change the orientation? To get signals from other stations?”

The uncle’s face grew tense as soon as his nephew explained what Mara wanted to do. The signal came from a satellite dish that he had applied for a license to use. When he was issued the license, he had also been given a descrambler to pick up the allowed signal — and only the allowed signal.

“The device blocks other signals,” the young man told Mara. “He’s not saying that, but everyone knows it’s true. And there is a wire on the dish mechanism — if it’s moved, the authorities will find out.”

“A wire? It reports back?”

“It’s more like a lock.”

“He can put it back and make it seem as if it hasn’t been touched,” said Mara. “They won’t find out.”

But the uncle would not be persuaded.

“Tell him the Chinese are attacking your country,” said Mara. “Tell him it’s important to find out what’s going on, before you are killed.”

“I tried. He said the government will let us know what needs to be done. We will not be defeated by the Chinese.”

Frustrated, Mara walked outside for some fresh air. She still had a few minutes before it was time to check in with Bangkok. Rather than calling early, she began walking up the street, looking to see if there were any vehicles she might borrow or, more likely, buy. She could use one to scout around the local roads, checking on the Chinese advance, before whatever Bangkok arranged to get her out.

Or just drive south to Hanoi and bug out on her own.

A flatbed truck was parked in a front yard two houses down, so close to the house that the bumper nearly touched the wall. Mara decided she wanted something else — the people here would need it if they had to flee.

“My uncle doesn’t believe there is a war,” said her translator, jogging up to join her as she stood looking at the truck.

“Where does he think the MiG came from?”

“It must have been a government plane, he says, and you are some sort of pirate.”

“Did he see the markings? It was clearly Chinese.”

“He couldn’t see the plane from here.”

“You saw the plane?”

The young man nodded. “Everyone in my village did. My uncle did, too, I’m sure. He’s just stubborn.”

“What’s your name?”

“Tom Khiaw.”

They shook hands, as if meeting for the first time.

“One of the village leaders was a mechanic for the air force in the American war, and knows the markings,” explained Tom. “But to my uncle, claiming that you are a pirate makes more sense than China being at war with us. You are American.”

“What will happen tomorrow when the government announces that you are at war?” asked Mara.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not that far from the border. The road network is bad, but still.”

“I think — we will wait and do as the government says. The old people will listen for what Uncle Ho tells them.”

Uncle Ho was Ho Chi Minh — Vietnam’s legendary leader, dead now many years. Tom — the name was pronounced as if it had two o’s — saw Mara’s confused expression and tried to explain.

“Uncle Ho is still with us in a way,” said the young man. “His spirit lives on.”

He meant that literally; many in Vietnam and in Asia believed that a person, especially one as important as Ho Chi Minh had been, continued to look after people following his death. Having saved the country from both the French and the Americans, he would undoubtedly do the same against the Chinese, who were more ancient enemies.

There was no sense debating religion. Mara pointed at the truck.

“Is there something smaller than that? Maybe a motorcycle that I could drive to Hanoi?”

“I know two people who have motorbikes. They’re at the other end of this street.”

“I have to make a phone call. You go there. I’ll follow.”

Mara waited until he was a little ways up the street before taking out her phone. Larry Hammer had taken over for DeBiase, and answered in his undertaker voice.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“All right, considering.” Mara gave him a quick update. “How long before you can get a plane up here? I want to get Kieu out — if the Chinese find him, they’ll probably arrest him.”

“Why would they arrest him?”

“For the same reason they tried to shoot us down,” she said. “They just will. All these people are in trouble, but they don’t seem to realize it. Or maybe they do and they don’t want to face it.”

“Listen, Lucas wants to talk to you,” said Hammer suddenly. “Here he is.”

“Hey, boss, how’s it hanging?”

“Mara, we have to talk.” His tone was dead-dirt serious, nearly always a sign of big trouble.

“Fire away.”

“It’s going to be a while before we get you out,” said Lucas.

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not until tomorrow or the next night. Maybe longer. At the moment I’m under orders to sit tight.”

“Things are that bad here?”

“They’re that confused. We should know a little more by the morning. I want you to stay in touch.”

She resisted the impulse to give him a wise-ass response. “Tell me where the Chinese are,” she said evenly.

Lucas sighed. Mara realized he couldn’t — if she somehow fell into Chinese hands, or even Vietnamese, and told them what she knew of the Chinese advance and when she knew it, she would pass on valuable information about the U.S.’s intelligence-gathering capabilities.

Which meant the Chinese must be very close. Damn close.

“Should I go back to Hanoi?”

Lucas hesitated. “I can’t tell you to do that. It may be too dangerous.”

“More dangerous than here?”

“Things are moving very quickly. Their intentions are not entirely clear, and our reconnaissance- ” He stopped himself, leaving her to guess what he had decided was too sensitive to share. “All I’m asking is for you to sit tight for now,” said Lucas. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know. I will get you. You can count on that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s not like Malaysia. I’m not Croton.”

“Hey, boss, I never said you were. And as far as Croton goes — we all work with what we got, right?”

“Mara, I promise — ”

“I’m worried about the phone’s battery, boss. I’ll sign back on at 0600 tomorrow. Sayonara until then.”

Peter Lucas handed the communications headset back to Hammer.

“How’d she take it?” asked Hammer.

“About what I expected.”

“She’s going to stay put?”

“Probably,” said Lucas.

“If she can get down to Saigon, she can get out,” said Hammer. “Even Hanoi.”

“She’s okay where she is for now. Farther south, she may run into the Chinese. Until we know exactly where they’re going, I can’t tell her to leave. I may be sending her right into a trap.”

“She’s in one already if they send more troops through Lao Cai.”

“Hey, Peter, you may want to look at this NSA summary,” said Gina DiMarco, who was monitoring the National Security bulletins at a nearby workstation. Gina was a cryptography clerk Lucas had pressed into service to help keep up with the data flow.

“What am I looking at?” he asked, dropping down to one knee to look at her screen.

“The Chinese started selectively blocking satellite phone communications from the area satellite phone services a few hours ago. AsiaSat2, Iridium — they’ve all been hit. The system is pretty sophisticated — there’s technical information on what exactly they’re doing back in this tab here.”

She rolled the cursor up and tapped one of the windows. A screen dense with words appeared.

“Do I need to know how this all works?” Lucas asked.

“No,” she said, clearly disappointed.

A strong scent stung Lucas’s nose.

“What’d you have for dinner?” he asked.

“Som tam. “ Papaya salad — with chilies. “My breath bad?”

“It’s sharp, Gina.”

“Sorry, boss. About an hour ago, a member of a UN science team tried calling out on the emergency line. The Chinese blocked the other side of the transmission shortly after it began. Then they blocked it completely, but he still continued to talk.”

“He didn’t realize it was blocked?”

“Apparently you can only tell that you don’t hear someone responding.”

“They can do that?”

“They’re using a type of ferret satellite.” Gina rolled the cursor arrow back toward the window with the technical data. “It’s kind of fascinating. They lock onto the bands the commercial satellite is using, and then selectively — ”

“You can explain it to me when we’re past all this,” Lucas said, starting to read the transcript.

10

Among the important first-night targets for the Chinese invaders was an army barracks just north of Lai Chau city. The two companies stationed there represented the only substantial Vietnamese force in the spearhead’s path. Defeating it was therefore important both tactically and psychologically, and Jing Yo’s platoon had been assigned to help secure the victory.

After being transported into the area with the main force, the commandos would leapfrog the defenses, sabotaging telephone and electric lines as they proceeded to a point southwest of the city where Highways 12 and 6 split. They would secure a small culvert bridge on Route 12 just south of that intersection, holding it to cut off any retreat by the Vietnamese.

The plan called for them to meet with three platoons of paratroopers, who were to have landed about five kilometers south and proceeded north along the highway. Because of the paratroopers — together the force amounted to about a hundred men — Jing Yo had been given only one of his squads, amounting to eight men, not counting him. The other was assigned to provide protection at the force headquarters, basically operating as bodyguards for Colonel Sun, who was traveling with the main body.

Jing Yo hadn’t protested when the orders were first drawn up; the paratroopers were well trained, and the force was more than sufficient to hold the bridge. But while racing to rejoin the tanks, the paratroopers had not been able to take off due to problems with their aircraft. That meant he and his eight men, initially assigned as little more than advance scouts, were now expected to do the work of one hundred.

Colonel Sun, of course, had not mentioned any of this when ordering him to rejoin the force. Jing Yo could only wonder if the colonel was purposely sabotaging him with an eye toward taking him down a peg or two.

Or maybe he was hoping he’d be killed when his unit was overrun.

Getting south past the column of rapidly advancing armor and trucks on the narrow Vietnamese highways wasn’t easy. In many cases the two lanes of Chinese traffic completely blocked the road, including the narrow shoulder. So by the time Jing Yo managed to meet up with the vanguard of the assault, they were almost within sight of the barracks’ perimeter. The infantry troops riding with the tanks had already dismounted, preparing for the attack.

“Through the field, quickly,” Jing Yo told Private Ai Gua, who was driving.

They veered across the ditch that ran along the highway. The land, tropical forest only a few years before, had been plowed under and turned into a wheat field. It was fallow at the moment; the season’s planting wouldn’t take place for another few months.

While the moon was very strong, it was difficult to see obstructions in the field without turning their headlights on. Twice Ai Gua barely missed large rocks. When he came to what looked like a path between the fields but turned out to be an irrigation ditch, he was going too fast to stop in time. He tried plunging across. He made it to the other side of the embankment, but then stalled the engine. Jing Yo leapt from the cab and ran to the back, where Sergeant Wu was already mustering the men in an attempt to push the vehicle forward.

There was only a small trickle of water in the bottom of the ditch, but its shallow sides were soft mud, and it took several minutes before the truck’s wheels finally caught enough hard earth to move forward. Ai Gua revved the engine, spattering mud over everyone, including Jing Yo, as he made it back onto solid ground.

“Let’s go!” yelled the lieutenant, racing back to the cab.

He heard gunshots in the distance, the low crack of rifle fire. The assault had already begun.

“Turn on the headlights,” he told Ai Gua. “Let’s go.”

Fifty meters farther on, they came to a dirt road that led back in the direction of the highway. They turned onto it, Ai Gua stomping the gas pedal for all he was worth. But the lane soon angled southward, away from the highway.

“We need to go west,” Jing Yo told Ai Gua. “Cut across the field.”

The private did as he was told. The vehicle jerked unevenly, climbing in the direction of the highway.

“Another ditch ahead, Lieutenant,” said Ai Gua.

“Try south. Turn left.”

They did, but it was obvious that the ditch blocking their way wasn’t going to end anytime soon. Jing Yo checked his GPS. According to the device, the nearest road back to the highway was two kilometers farther south.

“Stop here,” he told Ai Gua. He jerked open the door and ran to the back. “Take as much ammunition as you can,” he told his squad. “Leave the rucks. Let’s go, let’s go — we run from here.”

Sergeant Wu began mustering the men. Jing Yo told Ai Gua to take the truck alone, find the road, and come back north.

“Just me?”

“Just you, Private. I know you can do it.”

Ai Gua nodded. Jing Yo slapped the fender and he put it in gear, spitting up large clods of dirt as he drove away.

“Could’ve just left the truck,” said Sergeant Wu.

“I don’t want to lose it,” said Jing Yo. “And we can get there faster without the backpacks. He’ll be okay.” He raised his voice to what they had called in officers’ training a commanding shout. “Come on, men. The road is this way! We run together.”

The squad fell in behind him, moving at a good pace over the field. The night had cooled, and after the long ride the sensation of blood and adrenaline pumping through his veins felt good. Jing Yo ran at about three-quarters pace up the gradual rise, until he came to a three-strand barbed-wire fence whose black wires stood out against the moon-painted silver ground beyond.

He stopped and turned around, waiting as his men caught up. Sergeant Wu, the oldest of the squad — not to mention the heaviest smoker — took up the rear, wheezing as he ran. It would have been a better idea to let him take the truck, thought Jing Yo, but it is too late now.

Private Chin removed a small pair of wire cutters from his tactical vest and cut the wires, which fell lazily against the ground. Jing Yo plunged back into the lead, running a little faster, until he began to tire and wondered where the road was. Finally the dark slick of macadam appeared ahead. He slowed to a jog, extending his hands to alert the others. Then he raced ahead to the drainage ditch flanking the road, flopping down against the side.

There was enough moonlight to see the road, but the glasses’ magnification allowed him to see down it for about a kilometer. Once he was sure there were no snipers on the other side, he rose and ran to the edge, pausing to make sure he was still clear. Then he leapt across the road, landing on the opposite shoulder in two giant bounds. He slid into the ditch that ran along that side, once more making sure they weren’t running their way into an ambush.

When he didn’t spot anyone, he stood and whistled; his team double-timed across the highway.

“Where’s the bridge?” asked Wu, out of breath.

“This is Route 6. We’ve got to go across that field, then up to our right,” said Jing Yo. “It should be less than a hundred meters.”

“All right.”

Jing Yo paused, listening. The gunfire he’d heard earlier had stopped.

That didn’t make any sense. The assault should be well under way by now.

Maybe the Vietnamese had thrown down their weapons and were fleeing. In which case, Jing Yo had best get his men into position quickly.

“Let’s go,” he told his men, and once more began to run.

Running always reminded Jing Yo of the days before being formally accepted for training as a Ch‘an novitiate, when he and the other boys under the monks’ care had had to prepare their bodies for the order’s grueling physical tests. The early-morning and late-evening sessions cleared his head and made his body work with his mind in a way that couldn’t be entirely explained in words; it was as if the exercise created new pathways between his muscles and his brain. Even now, running relaxed him, and though there were many things Jing Yo could have thought or worried about — whether the Vietnamese had wired the bridge for explosives, whether a unit had been assigned to protect it — his mind was an easy blank, filled only with the idea and sensation of running.

The field climbed upward toward a small copse. Jing Yo ordered his men to rest as they reached it, planning to use the trees as a vantage point to scout for the road. But before he could climb one, Private Chin shouted.

“There! The road is there, through the trees.”

Their target was less than fifty meters away.

“Chin, Bo, with me,” said Jing Yo, already starting back in motion. “Sergeant, stay with the others and cover us until we are sure it is clear.”

Jing Yo’s right boot hit the pavement as the sky to the north turned white. An instant later, the first big shell from the tanks exploded as it hit one of the Vietnamese positions; a dozen or more followed in rapid succession. Even Jing Yo, who had been in combat several times before as a “mercenary” in Malaysia, stopped, his attention momentarily drawn to the thunderous assault a few kilometers away.

But only for a moment.

“The bridge is that way. Go!” he yelled. Then he turned back to Sergeant Wu, signaling for him to follow as he and the other two men ran north.

Jing Yo sprinted until he saw the low white arch at the side of the road ahead. The bridge seemed much smaller in real life than on the map they had used to prepare — so much smaller that when he reached it he took two GPS readings to make sure he had the right place. It rose barely three meters over a small, rocky stream, and extended for only ten or twelve meters.

“This is it?” asked Sergeant Wu, as always arriving at the rear of the pack.

“According to the GPS,” said Jing Yo.

“We should send someone north to make sure.”

Jing Yo agreed, and chose Chin and Bo, telling them to make sure they weren’t seen by anyone. Then he inspected the area, looking for a place to defend the bridge from if they were attacked. A cluster of trees sat on the bank at the northwestern side; otherwise there was no cover at all, except for the bridge walls.

“No explosives,” said Sergeant Wu. “They weren’t expecting us.”

They divided up the men, posting two in the trees and the rest in spots under the bridge, where they had decent firing lines on the road. Jing Yo called the division headquarters, announcing that they had reached their objective. He stayed on the bridge with Sergeant Wu, waiting for the two men whom they’d sent up the road, and watching the flashes on the horizon.

“I’d hate to be those bastards,” said Wu as a succession of explosions shook the ground. “Going against tanks at night. You never know what the hell hit you.”

The Vietnamese had faced tanks before, Jing Yo thought, when they fought the Americans and French. They had quickly become experts on antitank tactics and weapons; indeed, he had studied some of the Vietnamese tactics while training to be a commando, and used a few in Malaysia, though there the biggest vehicle he had fought against was an armored car.

“You think this is going to last long, Lieutenant?” asked Wu.

Jing Yo shrugged. He hadn’t really given it much thought.

“I think it will be over inside a week,” said Wu. “They’ll quit before we reach Saigon.”

“I would imagine the Americans thought the same way.”

Sergeant Wu laughed. “Yes, but we’re not the Americans.”

One of the men below hissed. Someone was running up the road.

“Hold your fire. It’s Bo and Chin,” said Jing Yo, recognizing the shadows. “Report.”

“The Vietnamese are coming,” said Chin breathlessly. “They have armored cars.”

“Shit,” said Wu, a little too loudly for Jing Yo’s taste. “Here comes hell.”

“Get your grenade launchers ready,” shouted Jing Yo. “Wait until they are very close!”

He took a step to run off the bridge, then realized that his men were watching and might misinterpret his haste. So he moved at a slow, almost relaxed pace up to the copse. Corporal Linn had already zeroed his shoulder-launched Type 2010 rocket-propelled grenade launcher on the road when he arrived.

In its basic design, the Type 2010 was very similar to the RPG-7 model the Vietcong used much farther south against the Americans in the 1960s war. But in the particulars — charge and propellant — it was much better. The shaped charge could get past all but the largest main battle tanks; even then, a charge fired at the right angle and in the right spot could disable a Russian tank. Jing Yo knew this for a fact, since he had seen it done.

The vehicles they were up against were not nearly so well protected. But they were not tin crates either. French-made Panhard Sagaie 1 ‘s, they mounted 90 mm guns on their low-slung turrets. The trucks had wheels rather than traditional tank treads, which allowed them to move relatively quickly — Jing Yo estimated they were doing at least thirty kilometers an hour as they rounded the last bend before the bridge, about eighty meters from the trees.

“Aim for the lead car,” he told Linn. “The ones behind it will crash.”

Linn waited another half second, then fired. The rocket spit across the night, its whistle thin against the sounds of the battle in the distance.

The nose of the armored car flashed white and it stopped dead in its tracks. As Jing Yo had predicted, the second vehicle ran into the rear of the first with a tremendous smash.

A second grenade, this one fired by one of the men near the bridge, hit the lead vehicle just below the turret’s muzzle. The charge penetrated the metal, and turned the inside of the tank red hot in an instant, not merely frying the occupants but setting off several of the thirty-odd charges for the gun. A fireball leapt from the open hatch at the top of the car, its red light cascading across the night sky.

Remarkably, the second car was able to back away from the wreck. As it moved, its gun began to rotate in the direction of the trees.

“Take it,” Jing Yo told Linn.

But the private was having trouble reloading his weapon and wasn’t ready. The muzzle of the armored car flashed, and Jing Yo felt his breath involuntarily catch in his chest.

It has missed, he thought, if I can feel this.

The shell had missed, whizzing through the trees several meters above them. The gunner in the armored car immediately began to correct; his next shell passed only a few centimeters away.

Linn’s grenade hit the front corner of the truck before he could get another one off.

The grenade happened to strike at a bad angle for penetration, and rather than sinking into the armor, it exploded outside of the vehicle, pushing it a few feet back but doing comparatively little damage. The explosion did throw off the gunner’s aim, shoving the muzzle upward as it fired.

Jing Yo leapt from behind the tree and ran toward the road. It was not a logical thing to do, nor was it entirely prudent. Yet he knew instinctively that he had to do it.

Racing across the road, he took one of the grenades from his tac vest and thumbed off the tape holding the fuse closed. He circled around the front of the burning armored car, swerving to avoid the flames as they shot out from under the turret. As he did, the gun on the second car swung in the direction of his men on the hill. Jing Yo grabbed the thick iron rail at the rear of the car’s body and leapt onto the Panhard, feet sprawling over the rear. Then he rolled upward and climbed to the top of the turret just as the car’s commander popped through the hatch and reached for the machine gun.

Jing Yo had not expected to have such an easy chance, and for the briefest moment — a fraction of a fraction of a second — he hesitated. Then he dropped the grenade through the opening. With his left hand, he grabbed the Vietnamese soldier and pulled him with him as he leapt back off the armored car. The grenade exploded with a dull thud, the vehicle rocking and then hissing as smoke rose from the open hatch.

Jing Yo dragged the Panhard commander across the road. The man was dazed, unable to comprehend what was going on, let alone resist. By the time Jing Yo’s men came up to help him, Jing Yo had already taken his pistol and trussed his hands behind his back with a thick plastic zip cord.

“You took quite a risk,” said Wu.

The launcher at the base of the bridge had not had a clear shot at the second tank, and it would have taken Linn nearly another minute to fire a third grenade, during which time the armored car’s gunner would surely have found his target.

Did he have to explain that to Wu? What was the point?

“What needed to be done, I did,” he said. “There was no other option.”

Sergeant Wu laughed softly, shaking his head.

The Vietnamese armored car commander was a sergeant, who was either too shell-shocked to say anything useful, or a very good actor. Jing Yo brought him under the bridge, removing the man’s boots. He used the laces to bind his feet.

“If you try to leave, my man will shoot you,” Jing Yo warned, first in Vietnamese and then in Chinese. “You’re not worth the trouble of chasing.”

Back up on the road, Sergeant Wu had climbed into the second armored car. With help from Linn, he cleared it of its dead crew, restarted it, and managed to back it up off the road. The main gun seemed to have been damaged during the fight, but the machine gun at the top was still working, a fact Sergeant Wu demonstrated with a few bursts in the direction of the curve to the north.

“We’ll catch them by surprise,” said the sergeant.

“If our tanks arrive, the surprise will be on us,” Jing Yo told him. He sent Private Chin back up the road to act as a lookout, then checked in with division to see how the assault was progressing.

Communications were coordinated at the divisional headquarters, a legacy of decades of Communist top-down military philosophy as well as the political need to keep tight control on the army. The headquarters was actually a mobile unit only a few kilometers behind the lead element of the assault; still, it was clear that they were having a difficult time sorting through the various reports and coordinating support on the fly.

Jing Yo was told to hold his ground; the tanks would be arriving shortly.

“We have disabled two enemy vehicles,” he repeated, sure that the specialist on the other side of the radio did not fully comprehend what he had just been told. “I don’t want the tanks to fire at us.”

“Yes, Captain, I understand.”

Under other circumstances, the unintended promotion might have amused Jing Yo, but it only made him even more wary.

“As soon as you see our units, get off the armored car and run away from it,” Jing Yo told Wu. “Take no chances.”

“You’re a fine one to talk about chances.”

“Don’t compare yourself to me, Sergeant. Simply do your duty.”

Jing Yo checked on each of his men, trotting to them in turn. Then he went over to the Vietnamese sergeant. The man was hunkered by the side of the stream, shivering.

It was such a pathetic sight that Jing Yo thought of putting him out of his misery: the man would face a life of shame as a prisoner of war, even after he was released. But he would have to face his fate; Jing Yo could not help him escape it.

The Panhard’s machine gun started firing. Jing Yo raced up the embankment and saw that several Vietnamese soldiers had come up through the field near the trees, apparently getting to the road before being spotted. Sergeant Wu had killed all but one; the survivor, having retreated to the ditch at the edge of the road, was firing back with an AK-47. His shots dinged harmlessly off the armored car. But the man was equally protected by his hiding place; Sergeant Wu couldn’t manage to silence him.

The firefight had an almost surreal quality, as if it were a practice exercise rather than an actual conflict. Wu would fire several rounds, temporarily silencing the Vietnamese soldier. Then, just as it seemed as if the man were dead, he would start firing from a slightly different position. Wu would respond, and the exchange would continue.

Finally, Wu tossed a hand grenade into the ditch. The AK-47 stopped firing.

A minute later, more trucks appeared on the road. These were pickup trucks, filled with Vietnamese soldiers who hung over the cab and off the back willy-nilly.

Sergeant Wu caught the first truck in the radiator, the machine gun’s bullets slicing into the engine block after passing through the narrow fins. Wu’s gun jammed as he swung it toward the second truck just to its left. Cursing, he fired a burst from his own rifle, then climbed out of the armored car and ran back toward the bridge.

By then, everyone else in the squad was emptying their rifles at the rest of the trucks. The Vietnamese threw themselves over the side, desperate to escape the hail of bullets as the vehicles knotted on the road.

“Stop wasting your ammunition!” yelled Jing Yo when he saw they were having little effect on the Vietnamese soldiers. “Let them bunch up! Linn, get ready to take it with a grenade.”

The lack of squad radios — a handicap he hadn’t had in Malaysia — hurt Jing Yo immensely. He couldn’t be sure his men heard what he was saying.

The hell with the army’s rules, he decided. He would find a way to procure squad radios as soon as possible.

Jing Yo heard one of the Vietnamese officers yelling something at his men, directing them one way or another — probably away from the truck, though he couldn’t quite be sure.

“Fire, Linn!” yelled Jing Yo, worried that they would soon lose their easy target. “Fire!”

Linn may or may not have heard him — they were separated by roughly forty meters — but if not, he read the situation as well as Jing Yo did. The grenade popped from its launcher, rocketing across the darkness in a fiery red flash like a meteorite plunging into the earth’s atmosphere. It hit the cab of the truck and exploded, sending shrapnel and debris into the small crowd of soldiers behind it. Panicked, the men began to retreat, only to be caught by Chin, who worked them over with his assault rifle.

The darkness, the confusion of battle, and most of all the inexperience of the Vietnamese soldiers had given the commandos a serious advantage against a numerically superior and more heavily armed foe. But Jing Yo realized that those were nebulous and fleeting qualities in war. His small force could easily be overmatched by the sheer number of Vietnamese soldiers trying to retreat down the road.

The first sign of this danger came a minute or so later, when he saw flashes in the field beyond the trees to his right. The Vietnamese had finally realized they didn’t have to use the road to advance.

“Chin! Drop back to the bridge, to the ravine!” Jing Yo ordered. He shouted, then had to resort to using his flashlight to send the message up the road.

Chin acknowledged, and began making his way back.

Had their instructions not been to hold the bridge, now would have been the time to retreat. The commandos had stalled the retreat, killed a large number of enemy soldiers, and not taken any casualties. An artillery strike zeroed in on the destroyed vehicles and then gradually expanding would safely eliminate a sizable portion of the enemy, and provide ample cover for Jing Yo and his men to get away.

But such a strike would almost surely damage the bridge as well, and besides, his instructions were to take and hold the span. It didn’t matter that the original plan had called for another three companies to be there to help, or that the bridge seemed, in Jing Yo’s opinion, considerably less important than the planners had believed. It mattered that those were his orders, and he knew better than to try and get them changed.

Having Chin retreat saved the private, who could easily have been overrun, but it also allowed the Vietnamese to advance without opposition. Jing Yo could partially compensate for this by having someone flank them from the east; it turned out that Sergeant Wu had already thought of this, and tracers began whipping through the brush and high grass.

A whistle sounded from the Vietnamese line. Jing Yo braced for an all-out attack, then realized that the Vietnamese commander was calling for a retreat.

“Hold your fire,” he ordered.

Undoubtedly it would be only a temporary respite. The enemy would regroup quickly.

Jing Yo called division again, to get a read on the location of the vanguard and to tell them that they were under heavy fire at the bridge. The major who was coordinating the attack communications told him that the vanguard was on Highway 12 and would soon be in his area.

“How close are they?” Jing Yo asked. “Can you give me a GPS point?”

“We don’t have specific data points,” said the major. “Things are in flux, Lieutenant.”

“We have a sizable number of enemy in front of us.”

“Then you have much opportunity. I must move on; there are many things happening.”

Judging only by the sound of explosions in the distance, the battle at the Lai Chau barracks had begun to wind down. But there was no way of knowing how close the tanks and infantry at the leading edge of the assault were. Nor could Jing Yo communicate directly with them.

Colonel Sun could. Jing Yo punched in the colonel’s command line. Sun surprised him by answering himself. His voice was nearly drowned out by the sound of explosions.

“Sun.”

“Colonel, we are holding the objective on Route 12,” said Jing Yo quickly. “We have a large force in front of us.”

“Good.”

“We have held off two assaults, one by armored cars. The force opposing us is mustering for a fresh attack. We’ve used about half of our ammunition,” said Jing Yo, laying out the problem in its starkest terms. “If they continue to press, we will run out of ammunition.”

“Hold your position,” snapped Sun.

“If I could get a read from the vanguard — ”

“Hold your position.”

The colonel snapped off the line.

“On the road!” yelled Sergeant Wu.

“Let them get a little closer,” said Jing Yo. “Wait until I fire. Sergeant, watch the right flank — this may just be to get our attention.”

Nearly two dozen Vietnamese came up the road, crouching along the sides in the thickest part of the shadows. Jing Yo waited until they were parallel with his position before starting to fire. The others quickly followed, cutting down about half of the attackers within a few seconds. The rest of the enemy fired back erratically, some at the copse, some at the bridge.

A second wave, another two dozen strong, came up behind them. There was no sense waiting this time; the commandos began firing as soon as the enemy was in range, and once again cut down about half the squad. But they took their first casualty as well: Private Bo got hit in the shoulder, and was temporarily out of action.

“Use the grenade launchers!” shouted Jing Yo, and almost immediately three of the small bombs exploded near the burned-out truck and the roadside. Unlike the rocket-propelled weapons, the 40 mm grenades were antipersonnel weapons, modeled on the grenades American infantrymen typically had mounted to their gun barrels. The Chinese version was roughly as dangerous, but they were in very short supply. The commandos had three launchers, with only four rounds apiece.

Gunfire erupted to the far right of the bridge, nearly a hundred meters away. One of the Vietnamese soldiers had been spooked in the dark, and he and his companions fired for thirty or forty seconds before their commander took nearly half a minute to get them under control. There were at least a dozen of them in the field, aiming to come up the flank against the commandos.

As the gunfire petered out, Wu decided to restoke it with a fresh round of grenades, hoping to get the Vietnamese to waste as much of their ammunition as possible. The night became an arc of red light, the gunfire so steady that for a few moments there seemed to be a solid wall of bullets.

Jing Yo ordered the sergeant to fall back, yelling his command and then signaling with the light. Wu acknowledged with a single blink.

Jing Yo and the two privates near him began firing, attracting the Vietnamese soldiers’ attention. When the answering fire began to peter out, Jing Yo got up and led the others down the hill, hustling through the trees and then staying low in the field until they reached the ravine. They slid in and moved up to the bridge quickly, reorienting themselves.

They’d have no hope against a concerted attack down the ravine; the enemy would have clear lines of fire to the bridge.

There was a whistle from the woods. This time it was a signal for an attack, and the Vietnamese began firing and rushing forward.

“Lai, Kim, back to the rocks,” he said, pointing to a set of low boulders on the bank. “I’ll cover from here.”

Jing Yo’s words were drowned out by two grenades, both of which exploded a short distance away. The Vietnamese were now advancing in front of them and to their side. There were at least several dozen men, maybe a hundred.

Jing Yo tossed a hand grenade, then emptied his gun’s magazine, pulled out the box, and slid in the mate he had taped to it. Within seconds he was through that one too, firing too fast, but there were so many bullets flying at him from so many directions that it was impossible to take his time. He hardly had to aim — there were flashes and bodies running toward him everywhere he looked.

He fumbled reloading, his fingers wet with sweat. He fired so quickly that he missed the incendiary round signaling he was near the end of the box, and was surprised when his gun clicked empty.

Jing Yo pushed a replacement into place and started firing again. Grenades exploded in a crescendo. Then something screeched behind the ravine, and suddenly the bullets stopped flying from that direction. Sergeant Wu had begun a counterattack, striking with several grenades into the heart of the Vietnamese force. The enemy was caught in the V of the dried-out stream, where Wu’s grenades found easy targets.

Jing Yo turned his attention back to the road. The Vietnamese were very close — all around the burned-out armored cars. He emptied his gun, then threw his last hand grenade.

Jing Yo pressed himself against the dirt, expecting to die now; the only question was whether he would run out of ammunition first.

Another whistle sounded. The enemy gunfire ceased. The Vietnamese commander had called for another retreat.

Jing Yo started to get up to look after his two men, then stopped — they hadn’t left his side.

That was a fatal decision for Lai; he’d been shot through the forehead.

Jing Yo took Lai’s gun and spare ammo. He’d been down to his last two boxes when he died.

“What ammunition do you have left?” Jing Yo asked Kim.

Kim held up his rifle. Jing Yo gave him Lai’s mags.

“Back to the bridge,” Jing Yo said.

Kim scrambled up from the streambed and ran toward the nearest dead body, hoping to get his gun and ammunition. It was a good idea, but a very dangerous one — before Jing Yo could warn him, gunfire from the highway shoulder near the burned-out armored car cut the private down. The bullets blew away a good portion of the private’s head, leaving no doubt he was dead.

Jing Yo fired in anger, unable to control himself. There was no answering fire, but it was impossible to tell whether he had killed Kim’s executioner or merely convinced him to take cover.

He made his way back to the ravine below the bridge. Wu was already there, tending to Chin. The private had been shot in the leg and groin. His blood flowed freely despite the bandage that Wu had placed; Jing Yo took a look at his face and knew he was going to die.

To lose so many men for an insignificant bridge — what would his mentors say?

That he had done his duty.

“Give him morphine,” Jing Yo told Wu as Chin began to scream in pain.

“Already did.”

Jing Yo opened his med pouch and took out his syringe. He pulled off the plastic protector and plunged it into Chin’s leg.

“Something’s coming,” said Wu. “A truck.”

Jing Yo turned to the north, then realized the vehicle was coming from the south.

Ai Gua.

He ran up onto the road. The vehicle did not have its lights on, and at the last moment Jing Yo felt a pang of indecision — what if this wasn’t Ai Gua? But then he recognized the shape of the cab.

“Sorry it took so long,” said the private, jerking to a stop.

“Pull off the road near the bridge,” said Jing Yo. “No — go over the bridge.”

Jing Yo leapt onto the running board as Ai Gua put the truck in gear and raced forward. They stopped a few yards beyond the stone pillars. Both men jumped out, ran to the back, and began pulling gear from the back. They managed two trips back to the stream before the Vietnamese began firing at them again.

Their ammunition had been replenished, but the odds were still overwhelming. They were down to six men, counting the wounded Bo.

“We could drop back off the bridge, let them come over, then retake it,” suggested Wu as Jing Yo caught his breath. “They’re just going to want to get the hell out of here. If we hit them hard enough, they’ll run.”

Jing Yo frowned.

“Who’s gonna know?” said Wu. “And what difference will a hundred Vietnamese make in the end?”

“I’ll know,” said Jing Yo, rising.

“Trucks coming down the road,” said Ai Gua as the sound of the vehicles rose above the cries of the wounded Vietnamese.

“There’s going to be another mad rush,” said Wu. “We’ll be massacred.”

“Take your three men and go up to the copse,” Jing Yo told him. “Wait until you hear me fire.”

Wu frowned, but then waved to the others and began cutting down the streambed to circle into the trees.

Jing Yo told Ai Gua and Bo to move up the ravine to the right and cover him.

“If they begin firing to your right, retreat back to those rocks,” Jing Yo told them. He gave them two grenades from the store he’d pulled out of the truck to use to cover the withdrawal.

“Where are you going, Lieutenant?” asked Ai Gua.

“I’m going to rig one of the demolition kits in the truck.”

Jing Yo crawled up the side of the streambed, moving across to the pavement on his belly for about ten meters before deciding to risk running the rest of the way. No one fired at him as he leapt into the back of truck.

It was too dark to see. He got to his knees and began feeling around for metal boxes where the demolition kits were stored. He started to open one, then realized it was a med kit. Finally he found one of the boxes with a double latch. Undoing them, he pulled up the top and reached inside for one of the briefcase-like kits.

The plastic explosives inside were relatively easy to handle. The charges were prewired and set with a small primer package at the side; intended to be put together as modular units and adjusted to the size of the target, they were activated either by a radio signal or, as a backup, wire current.

Radio was the much better option, but it required coding the control and charge units, a safety precaution to keep them from being exploded accidentally or by the enemy. With no time to do that, Jing Yo had to opt for the old-fashioned wire. He took the reel from the side of the case and clipped the leads in place. Then he put the explosive pack back into the storage box, tucked the control unit under his arm, and took the wire, stringing a good bit as he moved to the tailgate.

As he dropped down from the truck, he realized he had left his gun in the back. Cursing, he started to go back, then hit the ground as someone began firing at him. With bullets chewing through the macadam, Jing Yo crawled to the side of the road, stringing the wire out behind him.

He made it to the side of the road without being hit. Once in the ditch, he was no longer a target, and the shooter lost interest. Jing Yo crawled back to the streambed, trailing the wire.

“They’re coming!” yelled Ai Gua as engines began revving around the road.

Either forgetting his order or seeing an opportunity too good to pass up, Sergeant Wu’s team began firing. The Vietnamese began firing back.

Jing Yo curled himself around the detonator, wrapping the first lead around the metal post. A memory shot into his head — the last time he had done this under fire, in Malaysia. They’d snuck into an oil dump to sabotage some of the tanks, but had been surprised before the work could be completed. His two companions had been killed; he had escaped unscathed.

Luck had been his companion that night. Perhaps it would return.

Jing Yo finished attaching the wire, then unhooked the small hand crank at the side of the device. As he cranked it, he raised his head and peered over the side of the embankment.

Guns were blazing in earnest now — an armored personnel carrier rounded the curve, heading toward the armored cars. Bullets pinged off its side.

“Hold your fire!” yelled Jing Yo. “Wu! Stop firing! Stop! Stop!”

Wu couldn’t hear him and continued firing. But the bulk of the Vietnamese were moving with the armored car or along the other side of the road, trying to bypass Wu’s position and reach the bridge.

The APC — it appeared to be a captured American relic — rambled to the first armored car. Rather than continuing past, it pushed it off the roadway. A second APC came up behind it as it succeeded in getting the car off the pavement. It took on the second armored car, pushing it to the right.

A troop truck appeared behind it. Jing Yo felt his breath starting to get shallow and forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply.

The first APC approached the truck with the demolitions, aiming to push it out of the way.

Chin’s body was between it and the truck. The APC ran over it.

Not yet, Jing Yo told himself.

It would be best if he could get both APCs — he had to get both of them. But the other was ten meters away.

No time.

As the APC’s fender smacked up against the truck’s cab, Jing Yo pressed the detonator.

Nothing happened.

Jing Yo’s fingers flew down to the screws. He checked the connections, retightening them. Then he cranked up the charge again. The truck was screeching on the pavement, pushed sideways toward the edge of the road.

Jing Yo pulled up on the plunger, tugged to make sure it was engaged all the way, then slammed his hand down.

The truck seemed to implode in a flash of light. A crack and deep rumble followed, the explosion so fierce that the wind first pushed and then sucked at Jing Yo’s body, trying to pull him into the vaporizing truck.

The explosions and gunfire throughout the battle had steadily eroded Jing Yo’s hearing, but this was so loud it clapped him into hushed silence.

Caught by surprise, the Vietnamese APCs were heavily damaged. The front of the first, which took most of the force, sheared back in a distorted crumple. The other lost its treads and stopped dead. Maybe a dozen infantrymen had come around the bend behind the two APCs; at least half were killed by the explosion.

Nothing moved for a moment, not even Jing Yo’s heart. Then there were flashes on the right side of their position — Sergeant Wu and the others had caught sight of a second Vietnamese force off the road, coming up from the rear.

Wu did not have a perfect angle, and a number of the Vietnamese soldiers were able to push past. They reached the streambed to Jing Yo’s left. His hearing returned with the stutter of a machine gun, which began firing down in the direction of the bridge from his right.

The tanks were either going to make it to them now, he thought, or they were going to die. It was as simple as that.

He pressed himself against the side of the streambed below the bridge, trying to think of a way to get the machine gun.

The gunfire was too heavy for him to move. Dirt replaced the asphalt taste in his mouth as he pushed closer to the earth. He could hear everything now, wails as well as explosions, the cries of disembodied souls fleeing lifeless bones and skin.

A grenade — Sergeant Wu’s last one — took out the machine gun. Jing Yo heard his men calling to him.

Now was his chance to retreat. He could run down the streambed, cross over, order everyone back.

But he had his orders.

Jing Yo looked around him for his rifle before remembering he’d left it in the truck. He pulled his pistol out, then scrambled up the side of the streambed, deciding he would die on the bridge.

The ground shook with a heavy thud, then another. A black geyser of dirt rose through the moonlight near the curve.

The tanks had arrived.

“Pull back! Pull back to the other side of the bridge!” yelled Jing Yo, his voice hoarse. “The tanks are here. Be careful not to fire at our own men.”

11

Mara’s conversation with Lucas convinced her of two things: One, the Chinese were moving through Vietnam at a lightning pace, so quickly that it would soon be too late to slip out. And two, it was highly unlikely Lucas would be able to put a plan together anytime soon.

It made absolutely no sense for her to stay in the town, especially if she couldn’t provide any useful information. The only question was where to go.

Her best choice was Hanoi. Transportation out of the country would be much easier from there; she might even be able to arrange it herself. She would also be in a much better position to do something if Lucas needed her to.

There was an outside possibility that the scientists, if they weren’t already in Chinese custody, had made their way there as well. So Hanoi was the destination.

And there was no sense waiting.

“Let’s see this motorbike,” she told Tom.

“Two bikes,” he said, starting up the road.

“I don’t think my friend is going to be up to traveling tonight.”

“No. I go with you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes, yes. You need a guide.”

“I’m going pretty far.” She didn’t want to tell him where.

“More reason to come.” He stopped and turned to her. “You go to Hanoi, yes?”

“Hanoi?”

He laughed.

“I was thinking of Ho Chi Minh City,” she lied.

“Saigon. Better. But first go through Hanoi. I go all the way I am your guide.”

Mara started walking, unsure what else to say. Obviously, a guide would be valuable — but why was he volunteering? For excitement? Or because he was some sort of government agent?

Maybe the villagers hadn’t rallied to her because one of the older men recognized the airplane as belonging to an ancient enemy. Maybe this was a way to get her to Hanoi, and jail, with a minimum of hassle.

And yet, if that were the case, wouldn’t the uncle have pretended to help her?

The owner of the motorcycles seemed skeptical, which somehow reassured Mara. Tom convinced him to let them see the bikes, which were parked in a small shed behind his house. The hinges on the door had rusted into nothingness ages ago, and to open it the owner had to grasp the end and pick it up, pivoting it to the side as if it were still connected to the frame.

A two- or three-year-old Honda sat just beyond the threshold. Moonlight gleamed off the handlebars and glossy gas tank. The owner went to it and wheeled it from the shed.

“How much does he want?” Mara asked.

“It’s not that bike,” said Tom.

The bikes that were for sale — or might be — sat at the back of the shed. These were decidedly older, battered and dirty but not, as far as she could tell, rusted. They were Hondas, though not models she was familiar with from the States, or anywhere else for that matter.

“These work?” said Mara.

Not waiting for Tom to translate — her skepticism was evident — the owner seated himself on one of the bikes and kicked at the starter. It started on the second try, oily smoke pumping from the exhaust.

“It doesn’t have a light,” said Mara.

“That one does,” said Tom.

The owner left the bike running and went to the second. This one took several tries before it coughed to life. It stalled as soon as the owner tried revving the engine, and refused to start again.

“How much does he want for this one?” Mara asked, pointing at the one that bad run.

“It’s a package deal,” said Tom. “Two or none.”

“That’s not what he said, Tom.”

“Your Vietnamese is not very good.”

“I can ask him myself.”

She tried, but the owner either didn’t understand what she was saying, or was too busy fiddling with the bike’s engine to pay attention. After a few minutes of coaxing and gentle cursing, the bike revved to life.

“Good Honda, yes?” said the owner, a broad smile on his face.

“Does the light work?”

Tom translated, and the owner flicked it on. The beam grew stronger and weaker in rough sync with the uneven engine.

“How much?” asked Mara.

The two men began negotiating in Vietnamese. Finally Tom turned to her and said, “He’ll rent both for two hundred American.”

“I want to buy. And just one.”

“He won’t sell. Rent.”

“Tell him it’s unlikely I’ll be back.”

“He’s not going to sell.”

“Tell him. Tell him the Chinese are coming.”

“He won’t believe that.”

“I’ll tell him.”

Tom turned back to the owner and began explaining that she wouldn’t be able to get back — or at least Mara thought that’s what he was saying; she couldn’t keep up with the words as they flew back and forth.

“He will rent both for one seventy-five. Last offer.”

“I want to buy them,” Mara insisted.

“Not going to happen.” He smiled, obviously proud that he knew an appropriate piece of American slang.

“I just want one.”

“If I come with you, I can find someone to drive the motorcycle back,” said Tom. “This is cheaper than buying, no? And you need a guide.”

“All right,” said Mara finally. “I need to go back to the village to get the money.”

She didn’t have that much cash, but figured she could borrow it from Kieu. Tom, nearly ecstatic, began negotiating for gasoline. His tone was even more enthusiastic than before, and the two men appeared close to arguing before Mara finally cut them off.

“We’ll take his price, his last price,” she said. “I don’t want to be here all night.”

Kieu was sleeping soundly when she returned. Mara felt guilty as she went through his pants, now folded and placed carefully on his shoes at the side of the bed. The money she’d given him earlier was clipped in a wedge in his hip pocket, apparently untouched by the man looking after him, though Mara guessed it was more money than he would see in a year. His honesty made her feel even more guilty, and after counting out the bills — along with a little extra to help her get to Hanoi — she decided she would write out an IOU to make it clear that she intended to return the cash. The only paper she could find was the credit card receipt for the fuel; she tucked it into the wedge of bills and pushed it back into his pocket, folding the clothes at the edge of the bed.

“Someone will be back for you, if it’s not me,” she told him, though he hadn’t stirred. “We’ll pay for the plane.”

She saw the village doctor standing by the door as she tiptoed out.

“I’m going to pay him back,” she said. “I gave him the money in the first place.”

He didn’t answer.

“How long before he can travel?” she said, ignoring his stern look of disapproval.

“Four or five days. The pain will be greatest tomorrow.”

“I’ll be back,” said Mara, but her cracking voice didn’t even convince herself.

12

Peter Lucas massaged his forehead, trying to rub away the fatigue.

“You think this guy is real?” he asked DeBiase.

“There is a MacArthur on the team. Who would go to the trouble of faking this?”

“The Chinese maybe. The Vietnamese.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“The satellite phone number belongs to the team.”

“Somebody could have found it. The Chinese.”

“What would they have to gain by this?”

“Yeah.”

Still, Lucas didn’t like it. It was too enticing somehow, a big prize that had dropped into his lap.

Or maybe a prize. The guy could easily be dead by now.

“Best way to find out is to try calling the number,” said DeBiase. “It will go through our system, bypassing the jammed satellite. You have nothing to lose.”

The Chinese wouldn’t be able to jam the incoming call, but because Josh was using a commercial phone, the call could not be encrypted. If the Chinese happened to pick up the frequency — not a certainty, but a definite possibility — they’d hear everything.

But there was no other alternative — what the scientist had said was too enticing to pass up.

“Let’s give it a try,” Lucas told DeBiase. Then he leaned back against the console, waiting.

A thousand miles away in Vietnam., Josh McArthur had come to the end of his energy. Embedded in his small hollow near the side of the road, he stopped fighting fatigue and let his eyes close.

His mind began drifting. Different thoughts floated through his consciousness. Suddenly he was talking to his uncle, explaining what was going on.

Except it wasn’t his uncle. And he was no longer dreaming.

“Everyone at the science camp was killed?” said the voice.

“What’s your name?”

“Peter. My name is Peter. You’re sure of what you saw?”

“Everyone was killed. And in the village.”

“Could you find the village on a map?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want you to tell me where it is,” added the voice quickly. “Okay?”

“Okay.” Josh had only a rough idea now anyway “I have video.”

“Video?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Was he sleeping? Josh realized he was awake — truly awake. The phone had rung and he’d answered it still mostly asleep, with his brain working on automatic.

They’re going to rescue me. This is real.

He pushed out of his niche, standing on the road. The air seemed cool.

“Can you get me out of here?” he asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. We will. It’s not going to be easy.”

“I know that. Are you going to get me out?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Soon. For the time being, stay where you are.”

That’s impossible, thought Josh. But he didn’t want to disappoint the man, who might be his only chance for help.

Lucas rubbed his eyes as he looked at the map, pinpointing Josh MacArthur’s location with the help of the data DeBiase had gotten from the satellite. It was about ten kilometers from the science camp, very close to the Chinese border.

Very, very close.

Where was Mara?

Eighty-five kilometers away.

Far, even if the country wasn’t at war. And she’d have to cross into the area under Chinese control.

He couldn’t send just her. He’d need more people, a full team.

The hostage rescue unit. Or SEAL Team 2.

Either way, he needed his boss to sign off. But he would. This was big — a video of atrocities, an eyewitness.

“Josh, are you still with me?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m here.”

“I need you to — ” Lucas stopped short. He was on an open line; he couldn’t say anything.

Probably the Chinese weren’t listening. They had so much else to do.

“What do you need?” asked Josh.

“I need you to… I need you to hide for a while.”

“I am hiding. When are you going to get me?”

“Can we play it by ear?” Lucas asked. “I have a few — ”

“No. I want to get out of here.”

“We’ll get you out.” Lucas winced, remembering he’d said the same thing to Mara a short while before. “I just need time to work out the details.”

“How long?”

“It will take a while. At least a day.”

“A day?”

“Maybe even longer.” He had to be honest. “A few days. Can you make it?”

Josh didn’t answer at first. When he did, he sounded resigned. Not distraught, just resigned. “I can last a few days. Longer if I have to.”

“Just a few days. I’ll call you back.”

“When?”

Lucas bit his lip, trying to think what to say, and worried that he had already given away too much. He didn’t want to make it obvious that he knew the Chinese were blocking calls. He also didn’t want to give a specific time, which would make it easier to intercept his transmission.

Or even jam it, if they figured out how he was able to get around their gear.

“I’m moving around,” he told Josh finally. “I’m hard to get. But I can call you. At noon, I’ll call you.”

“Noon tomorrow?”

“Yes. Can you make it until then?”

“Of course.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“All right then,” said Lucas. “I’m going to hang up.”

But Josh MacArthur had already killed the line.

13

President Greene began swinging back and forth ever so slightly in the chair, a nervous habit he had picked up as a young pilot. If he cared to, he could probably have recalled the exact moment it started — a preflight briefing before a bombing mission up the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The irony would have struck him as extremely amusing — but this was not a moment for either irony or amusement.

“The Vietnamese aren’t saying anything officially.” Secretary of State Knox paused to rub his chin. He seemed genuinely insulted by the Vietnamese government’s reluctance to acknowledge they were in very deep trouble. “It’s possible that they simply don’t understand what’s going on. It’s all moving very quickly. Very quickly.”

“They’ve put troops in Lang Son, Bac Giang, and Quang Ninh provinces on alert in the last hour,” said Walter Jackson, the national security director. “They appear to believe the main thrust will come from the northeast.”

“Don’t you?” asked Knox.

“No. Admittedly they have troops there. But my Southeastern Asian expert thinks this is their main attack. The intelligence is still inconclusive.”

“There are a hell of a lot of troops in southeast China,” said Knox. “More than three times what Vietnam can field in the region. And they’ve made a show of moving there over the past several hours.”

“Exactly,” said Jackson. “They want them to be seen.”

“The units in that area are all undermanned,” said Frost, the CIA director. “And there’s no armor to speak of.”

“They attacked sooner than we thought,” said Knox. “And they’re moving faster. Frankly, we’ve been underestimating them.”

You have, thought Greene. The rest of us haven’t. I haven’t.

Greene’s thoughts flew back to his year in the Vietnamese POW camp, and then to the day of his release at the very end of the war. He could feel the hot tears that welled in his eyes — the first tears that he’d cried since the early days of torture. Tears of relief — and the vow that he would one day get revenge.

This was his opportunity, wasn’t it? Yet his duty demanded precisely the opposite.

Irony.

“Will they let us help them?” Greene said abruptly, turning to the secretary of state.

“I honestly don’t know,” said Knox.

“What did you have in mind?” asked Jackson.

“Intelligence for starters,” said the president. “Let them at least know what they’re dealing with.”

Greene rose. He had too much energy, physical as well as mental, to stay still when considering a problem. “We can’t just let the Chinese roll through Vietnam,” he added.

“Putting American troops into Vietnam — even I know that’s political suicide,” said Knox.

“We’d never get anything there beyond a token force anyway,” admitted Jackson. “And that’s if the Vietnamese even accepted our help.”

But the problem wasn’t Vietnam, it was China. Greene had known for years this day would come: the moment when China decided it no longer needed to play by the rest of the world’s rules. He hated parallels to the past, and was especially wary of comparisons to the years before World War II — they were too easy, too glib.

But if ever a situation looked like a replay of Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, this was it.

Or maybe the annexation of Austria. At least Czechoslovakia had generated some outrage. Early indications were that this would barely draw a yawn at the UN.

And forget about the American public’s reaction.

“We can’t just let the Chinese roll through Vietnam,” insisted Greene. “They must be stopped.”

“A weak show of force would be worse than no show of force,” said Jackson. “I agree with the Chiefs on that.”

“We could talk to the Vietnamese under the guise of preparing the protest to the UN,” said the secretary of state. “And give them intelligence that way.”

“Good,” said Greene. “That’s a start.”

“The Chinese have been working the justified-strike angle hard already,” said Knox. “They’re claiming they were attacked first.”

“What a bunch of horse shit,” said the president.

“The photo intelligence is ambiguous,” said Knox. “It’s possible — ”

“None of the other intelligence backs that up,” said Frost. “Besides, the Vietnamese aren’t that stupid.”

“Enough people will pretend they believe what the Chinese say,” said Greene. “That’s their goal. Make it hard to pass a resolution condemning them. Keep public opinion on their side, or at least paralyzed.”

This was the way war was fought in the twenty-first century, Greene thought — with one eye on world opinion and the other on the battlefield. But hadn’t it always been that way? Roosevelt, fighting the most popular war in American history, had worked tirelessly to make sure the voters remained supportive of the war effort. Even George Washington had staged his most famous — and desperate — attacks at Trenton and Princeton to convince his fellow countrymen that the war could be won.

“We just have to prove the Chinese are full of crap,” said Jackson.

“Easier said than done,” admitted Greene.

14

Peter Lucas bent forward as he rose from his chair, trying to unkink the knots in his back.

“This guy is a witness to a Chinese massacre,” Lucas said, addressing the image of his boss, CIA DDO Harold Park, projected on the flat screen in front of him. “He’s a scientist. He has a video. A video. That’s gold. More than gold. You saw the bulletins coming out of Beijing. They all make it sound as if Hanoi pushed troops over their border. The Europeans will buy it. Because they need peace. They don’t want China canceling contracts and withdrawing deposits because they voted the wrong way in the UN. Unless things are so obvious, so criminal, that they have no choice. That’s what this guy represents.”

The media campaign had started, and it was a good one, with terse reports to the official press, and several off-the-record remarks on the situation to the resident AP and Reuters correspondents, all indicating that Vietnam had unexpectedly crossed the border. Chinese troops were rushing to respond.

Hanoi had yet to comment. If the NSA intercepts were any indication, they had only a vague idea of what was going on. One of the CIA analysts had said they seemed to be in denial about what was happening.

“Where is this guy?”

“His last transmission was about ten kilometers from the science camp, a little more than five kilometers south of the border. We think we know which village he was referring to. It’s a Hmong settlement, very small. We’ve set it up for long-range surveillance by one of the Global Hawks. It looks to be right in the area where the Chinese advanced.” Lucas pressed closer to the video camera. “I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg, Harry. I’ve been looking at what the Chinese did in 1979, as they withdrew from Vietnam. They burned everything down. They hate the Vietnamese. You know what the rhetoric is like. I could see them doing this easily.”

“I have no doubt,” said Park bitterly. “What if the Chinese find your man first?”

“They may.”

Park stared at the camera broadcasting his image. It was more scowl than stare; Lucas knew he was working out the different possibilities in his head.

Then suddenly his face relaxed — the sign that he had made his decision.

“What do you need?” Park asked.

“SEAL Team Two.”

“Off limits.”

“Why?”

“We won’t get military personnel in. No U.S. personnel. I won’t even bother asking. I’ll only be shot down.”

“Just — ”

“Negative. U.S. military personnel are off limits.”

“All right. The hostage rescue team.”

“No. Same reason.”

“I’ll use my own people.”

“No American fingerprints, Peter. I don’t want anyone else going into that country.”

“Not even for this?”

“Especially for this. It’s too dangerous.”

“All right. The company from Korea we used in southern China last year.”

Park was speaking from a secure situation room at Langley; at least four other people were working nearby, though the system prevented Lucas from seeing anything more than shadows. One of them apparently said something to Park off camera. He turned away from the screen for a moment.

“Can you get them into Vietnam?” asked Park when he came back.

“Yes.”

“Quickly?”

“Yes.”

Lucas wasn’t sure how quickly he could get them there — or even if they’d take the job. But uncertainty wasn’t the way to win Park over.

“They’re expensive,” said Park.

“They’re worth it. And so is MacArthur. And his video.”

“Do it.”

“Thanks.” Lucas reached for the switch to kill the communication.

Park started to say something, but someone to the right of the screen caught his attention. Lucas watched as he bent over and conferred with an aide whom Lucas didn’t recognize. When Park came back on camera, his scowl had deepened.

“The Vietnamese won’t be able to remain in denial for very much longer,” he told Lucas. “The Chinese have just launched an air attack on the port facilities at Hai Phong.”

15

The spare can of gas Mara had strapped to the seat was only three-quarters full, and the gas sloshed every time the motorcycle hit a bump. The whole can shook and bounced every time she hit a bump, even though she’d stopped twice to make sure it was secure. Now it even bounced on the flat macadam.

Compared to the roads they’d taken out of Nam Det, Highway 2 was a superhighway. Not only was the road well paved — at least by Vietnamese standards — but it was also comparatively straight, which made it much easier to follow Tom. It was only two lanes across, but even during the day the road would have been empty for vast stretches, as it was now.

Mara had given Tom the motorcycle with the headlight, figuring that it made more sense for him to have it, since he was the one who knew where they were going. The problem was that he kept roaring ahead, and she had trouble staying with him. When they went through Vin Tuy — a small village on the outskirts of the Cham Chu Nature Reserve — she nearly missed the turn the highway took in the middle of town, guessing the way only after stopping and realizing the more logical choice was asphalt, not hard-pressed dirt.

Vin Tuy was tiny and quiet. So was Tan Yen, a slightly larger village about sixty kilometers farther south. The buildings looking like empty movie sets as she roared past.

Mara took the eerie quiet as an ominous sign. From what Lucas had said, the Chinese had launched an all-out invasion. Yet there was no sign of a response. The military and police checkpoints Mara expected were nowhere to be seen. Vietnam seemed to be sleeping through its incoming devastation.

Small farms dotted the jungle on both sides of the highway as she continued south. The global climate changes that had altered Vietnam’s rainfall patterns had encouraged more farming. This was especially evident in the central highlands and the south, where large swaths of jungle were being reclaimed and smaller plots were being consolidated to accommodate modern farming techniques. In the north, while the ground was just as fertile, the rugged hillside made development more difficult. It might be years before most of the uncultivated land was plowed under for farming.

Mara remembered the fields of her own childhood, paved over rather than plowed up as suburban sprawl marched inexorably across the American landscape. Now it was going back the other way — her uncle, who lived in a distant Philadelphia suburb, had just sold his tract house to a European agribusiness that planned to turn the development into a cornfield.

Roughly twenty minutes south of Tan Yen, tall shadows loomed on Mara’s left. For a moment she thought she saw a missile launcher in the black space beyond the road. There were two, five, but no activity around them.

Then she realized she was looking at a strip mine operation, an open pit where bauxite was extracted. She had mistaken the harmless machinery for something much more lethal. They were getting close to Tuyên Quang, a city about seventy-five kilometers north of Hanoi, nestled in the valley between the Con Voi and Tam Dao mountains.

It was also the place where they had arranged to stop and refuel their bikes. Houses began to appear close to the road, in ones and twos at first, then in clumps, then in solid rows. Mara found it harder and harder to keep up with Tom; her bike was slightly less powerful than his, but more important, the shadows and her fatigue ate at her confidence, and she couldn’t force herself to drive any faster. Finally she lost sight of his dim red taillight, the road taking a twist before entering town.

This would have been the perfect spot for a military or police sentry, but there was none. Mara slowed, mentally rehearsing the words she would use if she was stopped. But the main street was as deserted as those of the small villages farther north. It was only as she was leaving town — with Tom’s brake light finally ahead in the distance — that she saw an army transport. It was parked on a side street. The tailgate was up, but she could see someone moving near it as she passed.

Tom stopped at the side of the road about a kilometer outside of the city limits. He’d already filled his tank and thrown away his gas can when she drove up.

“You turtle,” he laughed. “Me hare.”

“Don’t forget the turtle wins in the end,” said Mara.

When she got off the bike, she realized that the rusted top corner of the can had sprung a leak. It was minuscule, but enough gas had spit out to wet the back of her shirt. She squeezed the liquid from her shirt and pants, but the odor seemed to get stronger.

The Clear River bent close to the highway; she could see it as she emptied the gas can into her tank. Some of the smaller tributaries near the road were dry, but there was still a sizable pond a dozen meters from the road. Mara went down to it, stripped off her shoes, and waded in, dunking herself in a vain attempt to rinse the smell away.

“You crazy lady?” asked Tom as she climbed back up to the bike.

“I felt like taking a bath.”

“Hanoi two hours,” he said, kicking his bike to life. “Less if you drive fast like me.”

“Wait!” yelled Mara.

She wanted to go over again how they would deal with anyone who stopped them, emphasizing her status as a journalist, but Tom had already launched his bike. She went to hers, got it going — the kicks got easier with practice — and set off after him.

Route 2 crossed the river near Viet Triv. Fish farms had been built in the delta formed by the river and its tributaries; the pennants that marked the underwater fences fluttered in the moonlight as they passed. The land flattened, with large communal farms gradually giving way to a real city — Vinh Yen, the provincial capital and the headquarters for an infantry division.

The army base lay on the northern side of the city, away from the highway and most of the civilian population. Lulled by her earlier experiences, Mara was surprised to find the road ahead blocked by a pair of jeeplike vehicles. Two soldiers, one with a rifle slung over his shoulder, the other with a set of traffic flags, stood in front of the trucks.

Tom was nowhere in sight. Mara had her passport with her, and a credible cover story, but with only a second or two to make up her mind, she followed the instincts that told her not to stop if she could possibly help it. Hunkering down near the handlebars, she squeezed the throttle and shot by the soldiers.

Her burst of speed made it much harder for her to keep her balance as she ran across a series of bumps a few meters beyond the trucks. The bike vibrated worse than a bronco on a cold Texas night. Easing off the throttle, she saw an army truck up ahead — another checkpoint.

If she was going to avoid one, she was going to avoid them all. Spotting a street to the right, Mara turned down it, nearly ditching the bike as the pavement changed from macadam to dirt.

Mara tucked left with the road, found another intersection, and turned back to the right, following the general direction south and hoping Highway 2 would appear soon. But the road took her into a maze of low-slung apartment buildings, new housing for government workers lucky enough to win selection in the bureaucratic lottery — or more likely, perceptive enough to find the right person to bribe. She went left, then right, then left again, finally running out of roadway and crossing a field rutted by trucks. Seeing what she thought was the road to her left, Mara started to lean and accelerate, only to find herself flying headfirst over the handlebars.

The ground came up too fast for her to react, let alone think. She smashed her nose hard, felt her left shoulder crash and give way. Her body twirled hard left as she slid another six feet.

“Shit, that hurt,” said Mara, pushing her hands under her chest and lifting herself up.

Her cheeks had been scraped so badly they felt like they were on fire; her nose felt soft, full of blood. She pushed the dirt away from her eyes, then spun quickly, sure she was about to be grabbed by the soldiers. But there was no one there, only the bike, groaning as it circled in the dust, its rear wheel still engaged and propelling it in a crazy arc.

Mara grabbed the handlebars and pushed it upright, trying to mount as she did. But the throttle had jammed, and the wheel was moving too fast for her. She fell back on her butt, just barely managing to throw the Honda off to the other side as she went down.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” she told herself, willing her body to get itself back on its feet. She grabbed the bike and killed the engine. Back upright, it took only a kick to get it restarted, but the transmission had gotten stuck in fourth gear, and as soon as the clutch engaged, it stalled. She pushed forward to a little hill, started moving downhill, then restarted the engine. The bike jerked and bucked as she let go of the clutch, but didn’t stall; she worked the controls and unjammed whatever had tied it up.

Her nose was bleeding. Blood trickled down, a few drops at a time, to the left corner of her mouth. Her cheeks burned where she’d scraped them, and hurt more with the wind as she rode. She didn’t dare try to peek in the mirror to see what her face looked like.

It took Mara nearly a half hour of zigging and zagging to find Route 2. There was no sign of Tom on the road; if he’d made it through the checkpoints, he could easily be halfway to Hanoi by now.

Mara drove in dull numbness for the next hour and a half, her mind in a state of semishock. It was far from the most dire situation she’d ever faced — not even in the top three — but still, her body needed to recover from the pounding.

When she spotted the glow of lights from Noi Bai Airport in the distance, Mara examined her options again. The best might be simply to go there, grab a plane — any plane — and get the hell out.

She was too bloody for that; she needed new clothes and a bath.

A long, long bath, in a tub filled with Epsom salts.

And then?

She’d be needed here. She couldn’t bug out when there was work to be done.

Expecting that the airport would be a mustering point for the army as well as the air force, Mara took a right onto the first decent-looking road she came to, heading south. She hadn’t had much to eat back in the village, and on top of the bruises and cuts, she was beginning to feel faint. She wasn’t tired at least — her heart was beating too fast to let her rest.

There were plenty of houses along the road, and Mara slowed, hoping to see one with a clothesline where she could steal a dress. About a mile after turning off the main highway she came to a shantytown of shacks, each seemingly leaning on the other. She decided it would be the perfect place to “shop.”

Idling back her engine, Mara eased the bike into the warren of houses, looking down the alleys into the backyards. Rope was strung between the houses for clotheslines, but there were only a few items out; the handful of things she saw that might be close to her size were dresses, and she would have greatly preferred pants. But she was in no position to be too picky, and after leaning the bike against a building across the way, she slipped back through the alley and found a dress and pair of men’s pants that looked as if they would fit.

She felt guilty about taking the clothes, which were undoubtedly among the family’s few possessions. Her conscience suggested that she leave one of her hundred-dollar bills, but that might be dangerous for the family, since it would inevitably raise questions about where the funds had come from. In the end, she left nothing.

Mara drove back to the highway, then found a narrow lane that led to a fallow field where she could change. The pants came to her calves, but their pockets gave her a place where she could tuck her satellite phone, money, and ID. She hiked the dress — a bit short and tight at the bosom, though ample at the waist — and folded it beneath her thighs so she could ride the bike more easily. Then she set back out for Hanoi, dumping her pants in a ditch before returning to the highway.

Two kilometers later, Mara saw a dim red shadow from a flashing police light beyond the next rise. She pulled over, checking her passport, but decided to avoid the checkpoint by going back to the side streets. There were still a few hours before dawn, and it would seem more than a little odd to a Vietnamese policeman that a foreigner was driving when almost no one else was.

Her first right took her down a street lined with warehouse buildings, all relatively new. Streetlights lit the intersections, hazes of yellow mist wafting around the lights.

She started to turn left at the first intersection, then pulled back as she caught sight of a line of trucks idling in the road ahead. They looked like troop trucks, but it was dark and she didn’t think it wise to stop or get any closer to find out.

Mara wound her way through the industrial park into an apartment complex and then an older residential area, going slowly to soften the noise of her engine. She had only the vaguest idea of where she was in the city, and soon became confused enough that she decided she needed to take a break. Making sure she was alone, she pulled off to the side of the road on a quiet street down the hill from an apartment complex.

Mara decided to check in with Bangkok. She couldn’t call from the Star, and whoever was on the communications desk might also be able to point her in the right direction. She was getting low on gas, and admitting she was lost was better than walking.

“It’s Mara,” she said as the line connected.

“This is Peter.”

“Hey, boss.”

“I’m glad you checked in. We have a developing situation. That science team — ”

“Fleming?”

“Somebody else on the team. He’s south of Lao Cai. You think you can get there?”

“Yeah. No problem. He’s in the city?”

“No, he’s in the jungle somewhere. We’re working on getting a real fix — we can track his satellite phone, but only when he transmits. How long will it take you?”

“I have no idea. A day, maybe. I’ll have to find better wheels.”

Lucas didn’t answer for a moment. Then he asked where she was, surprise in his voice.

“That’s a good question. I got kind of confused on these side streets — ”

“You’re in Hanoi. “

“Right. Somewhere west of the center of town, but I don’t — ”

“What the hell are you doing there? Didn’t I tell you to stay where you were?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Bullshit — ”

“You told me you didn’t know when you could get me out. I figured if I’d stayed there, I’d be behind Chinese lines.”

“Goddamn it.”

“I didn’t know you were going to give me another assignment. You should have told me.”

“That’s not the point, Mara.”

“Don’t worry about it. I can get back. There are no checkpoints beyond Vinh Yen. Do these people realize they’re at war?”

“You’re two hundred friggin’ kilometers from where MacArthur is.”

“Where is he exactly?”

“You’re not going back.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, then how do you know he’s two hundred friggin’ kilometers away? Give me the location of the last transmission.”

“Get yourself to the embassy. Get out.”

“Like hell. If I go to the embassy, I’m burned for Southeast Asia. Right? The Vietnamese watch the place around the clock. That’s the reason you didn’t use them for this. Correct?”

“Get your ass to Hanoi.”

“I’m in Hanoi.”

“I want you out of the country, Mara. Come back to Bangkok.”

“Bullshit!” Mara couldn’t help herself. “This is what I’m trained to do, Peter — you want this guy? Fine. I’m here. I’m ready. You have a covert fucking mission, it’s mine. You know I’m good. You know what I’ve done. You know this is for me.”

“You’re supposed to do what you’re told,” he said, his voice slightly more subdued.

“You did not tell me to stay put. And even if you had — which you didn’t — if you had, it’s up to the officer in the field to make the final call. Lucas — Peter — you always say you don’t second-guess… If I were a man, you would not be giving me crap over this, Peter. I know you wouldn’t. You’re treating me like your daughter. And I’m not. I’m a field agent. With experience. Good experience. This is my mission, these scientists.”

“I don’t think of you as my daughter.”

“Then why are you giving me crap? Because of Malaysia?”

“You did fine in Malaysia.”

“So it’s sex, huh?”

The words weren’t coming out the way she wanted them to, but she was too mad to get them into the right order.

“This is what I was trained to do,” she repeated. “Don’t screw me here, Peter.”

“Damn it, Mara, give me a break.”

She heard him expel a deep breath, almost a hoarse sigh, as if his whole body were involved in the act of thinking, of making a decision.

Men always claimed that they didn’t think about an officer’s gender before making a decision on a mission, but Mara and most other women knew that was a crock; it always entered into the equation, whether consciously or not. She was always fighting to overcome the prejudice. Every woman did.

“I’ll be back in Nam Det by this time tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll need a good location by then.”

“You’re going to need help. The Chinese are all around him.”

“So get me help.”

Before Lucas could reply, the ground shook as if in an earthquake. The night flashed white, then red. Mara turned around on the bike and saw flames shooting up from the industrial area she’d driven through just before. Flames popped up in a row to the north. There were more explosions, and then antiaircraft guns and sirens began to sound.

“Mara?”

“I’ll have to call you back,” she told Lucas.

“Mara!”

“Hanoi’s on fire. It’s being bombed. The whole goddamn city, from the looks of it.”