Shock of War

1

Premier Cho Lai watched the American on the video screen dispassionately, willing himself to study the man and what he said with the mind of a scientist and observer. The American’s message was one of venom, directed at Cho and his people, the Chinese country, and especially the Chinese army. It made Cho boil with anger and lust for vengeance. He wanted with all his heart to punch his hand through the video screen, to smash it — or better, to punch through the screen and somehow take this Josh MacArthur by his skinny, blotchy neck and strangle him. Cho could almost feel the boy’s thorax collapsing beneath his hands.

Boy.

That was what he was. Not a scientist, not a man — a boy. A rodent. Scum.

No one would take him seriously if not for the images he’d brought back. They flashed on the screen as the scum’s voice continued to speak. The Chinese translation played across the bottom of the screen, but Cho had no need for it; he spoke English reasonably well, and in any event the images themselves told the story.

All of his careful planning to make the invasion look as if the Vietnamese had instigated the war was threatened by this scum. It mattered nothing to Vietnam — Vietnam would be crushed no matter what the world thought. China needed its rice and oil, and it would have it.

But this threatened the next step. For Cho knew that his country’s appetite was insatiable. The people who thronged the streets of Beijing not far from his compound were desperately short of food. Keeping them satisfied was an impossible task.

Impossible for anyone but him. The last two governments had toppled in rapid succession, each lasting less than two short months thanks to food riots and dissension. Cho had used the unrest to maneuver himself to power, promising to end the disturbances. He would remain in power only as long as he could keep that promise. It was not that he had any enemies — the most prominent had met unfortunate accidents over the past few months, or else been exposed in corruption trials, or, in a few cases, bought off with timely appointments outside the country. But as his own rise had shown, it was not the prominent one who had to fear in the chaos of the moment; it was the obscure. Cho had risen from a job as lieutenant governor for agriculture in the parched western provinces. Two years before, no one in Beijing would even have known his name. Now they bowed to him.

As the world would.

But first, this danger must be dealt with. America, the world, must not be brought into the conflict. The giant must not be wakened, until it was too late for it to stop the inevitable momentum of Chinese conquest.

Cho snapped off the video. He had seen enough.

2

Major Zeus Murphy tried not to look too conspicuous as he walked down the concourse toward his flight. In theory, he had nothing to fear: the United States and China were not at war, and while his U.S. passport had caused a few seconds of hesitation at the security gate, the check of his baggage had been perfunctory at best. But theory and reality did not always mesh, especially in this case: the war between China and Vietnam had greatly strained relations between the two countries, and even in the best times Chinese customs officials and local police were not exactly known for being evenhanded when dealing with citizens from other countries.

And in this case, Zeus had a little extra to fear: he had just led a guerilla operation against the Chinese naval fleet gathered in the harbor, hopefully preventing it from launching an attack against the Vietnamese.

He could see the red glow of distant flames reflecting in the dark glass of the passageway as he walked toward the gate. Too much time had passed for the fire to be on one of the boats they had blown up; Zeus suspected instead it was due to friendly fire, panic set off by the supposed attack of Vietnamese submarines on the landing ships that were gathered in the port.

All for the better.

A television screen hung on the wall near the gate ahead. Zeus slowed down to get a look. In the U.S., it would be set to a local or allnews station; by now it would be carrying live feeds from the attack, breathless correspondents warning of the coming apocalypse. Here it showed some sort of Chinese soap opera, or maybe a reality show; he couldn’t quite tell and didn’t want to make himself too conspicuous by stopping.

He passed two more screens as he walked. Both were set to Chinese financial news stations. Though it was night here, it was still daytime in the U.S., and tickers showed stock prices across the bottom.

A lot of red letters and down arrows, Zeus noticed. War wasn’t good for anyone’s economy.

“I thought you’d never get here,” said Win Christian, who rose from a seat across from the television.

Christian was also a major, was also in the U.S. Army, and had also just helped blow up part of the invasion fleet. The two men had snuck ashore with the help of a Vietnamese agent, assumed identities as businessmen, and headed for the easiest way out — a Chinese flight to Hong Kong, and from there to Japan.

Zeus nodded. They’d gotten into different lines at the security checkpoint, splitting up in case they were stopped.

“Where’s the girl?” Christian asked, referring to the Vietnamese agent, Solt Jan.

“I thought she was with you,” answered Zeus.

Christian seemed even more nervous than he had earlier. Fidgeting, his eyes shifted continually, glancing in every direction. “I hope she didn’t bail.”

“We got our tickets. Relax.”

Christian glanced around. There were about forty people at the gate, waiting for the 11 p.m. flight to Hong Kong. The destination was written in English as well as Chinese on a whiteboard that sat on an easel next to the podium in front of the door to the plane tunnel. The door was closed, and the podium itself was roped off by a velvet-covered chain. There were no attendants nearby.

Zeus glanced at his watch.

“Half hour before boarding,” he told Christian. “Let’s get something to eat.”

“You think that’s wise?”

Zeus started toward a kiosk about ten meters away in the center of the gate area. Maybe some food would calm Christian down.

“Guess it can’t be any worse than Vietnamese food,” said Christian, catching up.

Zeus closed his eyes at the word Vietnamese. He glanced at Christian, who’d turned beet red.

“I know,” muttered Christian almost inaudibly. “Sorry.”

Zeus didn’t reply At least Christian realized he’d been an idiot; they were making progress.

The vendor was a few years younger than Zeus, twenty-one or twenty-two at most. Zeus pointed at a bag of American-style potato chips.

“Ten yuan,” said the young man in English.

Zeus dug into his pocket. Solt had given him some Chinese money on the way over. He had some American money in his wallet as well — fifty dollars, barely enough to bribe the passport control people in Hong Kong, which would be necessary to get to Tokyo since his passport lacked the proper visa stamps.

“Here are your crisps,” said the man, using the British term for the snack as he handed them over.

“I’ll have a bag, too,” said Christian.

The man kept his eyes locked on Zeus’s. It was a menacing stare, a dare.

Why?

“My change,” said Zeus.

The man’s mouth twisted into a smile. Zeus held out his hand. The man looked down at it, and for a moment Zeus thought he was going to spit. Instead, he reached into the cash register. He took a bill and some coins, then dropped them into Zeus’s outstretched palm.

Zeus locked his eyes on the man, not even bothering to count the change.

“All of it,” he said.

The clerk’s smile broadened. He reached into the register and fished out the right change, placing it into Zeus’s hand.

“What the hell was that about?” Christian asked as they walked back to the gate.

“Got me,” said Zeus.

“He spoke English pretty well.”

“Yeah,” said Zeus. “Good enough.”

An airline employee had appeared at the podium and was fiddling with a microphone. She began to speak as Zeus and Christian approached. A few passengers got up from their seats; the rest looked anxiously toward her as she continued.

“What’s she saying?” Christian asked.

“I didn’t learn to speak Chinese in the last twenty minutes,” snapped Zeus. “Did you?”

He reached into his pocket for his ticket, expecting she was trying to organize the boarding — probably asking for people with small children first. But no one moved forward.

A short, balding man near the gate began speaking to the woman, haranguing her in slightly angry Chinese. Zeus turned around, looking for Solt. She should have met them by now.

Admittedly, she hadn’t told him that she’d been on the flight; he’d just assumed that when she pressed the ticket into his hand in the lobby before disappearing in the crowd.

“They’re not moving,” said Christian. “What’s going on?”

“Flight cancel,” said a grim-faced man nearby. He added something in Chinese.

“Excuse me,” said Zeus. “The flight’s canceled? Why?”

The man shook his head.

Zeus tried repeating the question, phrasing it more simply and speaking slower. “Why is the flight canceled?”

“Flight cancel,” said the man. “Problem at airport. All flight.”

“Shit,” said Christian.

“Is it temporary?” asked Zeus.

Again, the man shook his head, not understanding. The passengers at the podium moved closer to the woman, apparently asking questions.

“Do you know… the next flight? When?” asked Zeus, trying to simplify what he wanted to know. “Is there another flight?”

The man said something in Chinese. Zeus didn’t understand the words, but the meaning itself was clear: He had no idea.

Most of the people at the gate remained in their seats. Zeus guessed that the airline was making other arrangements, and they had been told to wait.

Or maybe not. Maybe the entire airport was closed. Maybe they thought they were under attack.

He told himself to calm down, to relax and think it through. He was a businessman, not a saboteur — be aggravated, annoyed, not alarmed.

“What are we going to do?” Christian asked.

“I’ll ask what the story is,” said Zeus. “Maybe some of the airline people speak English. Come on.”

“Right behind you,” hissed Christian.

They joined the small knot of people near the attendant. Zeus stood patiently, hoping to hear someone speaking English. He didn’t.

The people around him were mostly men, speaking quickly and not very politely. The woman fended them off with short bursts, giving as good as she got. It struck him that she was speaking the universal language of airline gate attendants: Sorry, you’re shit out of luck.

“Excuse me,” said Zeus as the cacophony around him hit a lull. “Do you speak English?”

“Flight cancel,” said the woman.

“Why?”

She turned to another passenger, who was saying something else. By the time she turned back in Zeus’s direction, it was obvious she had forgotten what he had said.

“Is there another flight?” asked Zeus. “Will there be another flight? To Hong Kong.”

“Oh, yes.”

“When is the flight?”

Again she started to turn away to answer a different passenger. Zeus reached forward and touched her arm. The woman jerked back.

“I’m sorry,” said Zeus. “When is the flight?”

“No flight,” said the woman. She added something in Chinese, then began answering a man to Zeus’s right.

Deciding he wasn’t going to get any more information from her, Zeus took a few steps back.

The first order of business was to look for Solt Jan. Zeus turned to his left and faced the large aisle at the center of the gate area. He began scanning the faces of the crowd, examining each one in turn. The Vietnamese agent was a small woman, thin and petite. Pretty and petite. Dark hair, exotic looks: Asian and something else as well, probably Western, French maybe, or even Scandinavian.

Zeus turned almost completely around without spotting her.

“What do you think?” Christian’s voice trembled.

“She must have gone back into the city,” said Zeus. “It’s just as well; they might suspect her. Let’s just play this through. We find an airline person who speaks English. We’re businessmen, stranded because of our flight. Just play it through.”

“What if we can’t get to Hong Kong?”

Zeus shook his head. There were plenty of alternatives.

“I don’t like this,” said Christian.

“Here. Have some crisps.”

Zeus held the top of the bag in his two hands and began pulling the sides apart slowly, trying to keep the bag intact as he ripped it. It required a certain amount of finesse, strength, and restraint at the same time.

The bag top separated cleanly. He held the chips out to Christian. “Here,” he said. “Have one.”

Someone tapped Zeus from behind. He spun around, surprised.

“You are Mr. Murphy,” said a short man in a Chinese army uniform. It didn’t sound like a question.

“Excuse me?”

“You are Murphy?”

Zeus hesitated. If he said no and the man asked for his passport, then what would he do? Run?

Zeus looked at his uniform. It was light tan. He was an officer, a captain.

What did the insignia mean? Air force?

Would the airline have sent him?

We’re not at war. Relax.

The officer started to put out his hand; Zeus guessed that he was about to ask for his ID.

“I’m Murphy,” he admitted.

The Chinese officer said nothing, turning instead to Christian.

“You are Christian,” he said.

Christian had nearly crossed his eyes. He looked at Zeus, undoubtedly wondering why the hell he had agreed.

Play it through, Zeus thought. We’re businessmen.

“Mr. Christian?” repeated the officer.

“Yes?” said Christian finally.

“You are to come with me.”

The officer turned sharply. Two other men, these in blue uniforms, stood a short distance away, watching. Zeus noticed that they had unsnapped to the protective strap at the top of their holsters, allowing free access to their sidearms.

“What’s going on?” asked Christian.

The officer stopped abruptly. He wore a deep frown.

“You will follow me,” he said again, in a voice that brooked no argument.

3

Josh MacArthur reached into his pocket for a tissue to blow his nose before remembering that he had used the last one a few minutes ago. He closed his eyes as he sneezed, his whole body shaking with the force.

“Allergies,” he mumbled, getting up from his seat. “I just…need…a…tish — ”

He sneezed before he could finish the sentence.

Mumbling another apology, Josh made his way to the private restroom at the side of the office, pushing through the door as his body was wracked by a quick success of sneezes.

Damn allergies!

His allergies had saved his life in Vietnam. But on the whole, he would just as well do without them.

There were no more tissues in the box on the shelf above the sink. Josh grabbed a length of toilet paper and unfurled it, folding it over quickly and then trying to clear the mess from his nose. It was a lost cause, as were antihistamines, saline sprays, and all manner of remedies he’d tried over the years. Removing the allergen was the only real solution.

But what the hell was the allergen here, midway up the UN building, in the middle of a block of offices whose windows didn’t even open?

Josh sneezed again. He cleared his nose, dumped some of the paper into the toilet, and flushed. He sneezed, blew his nose, then felt his sinuses clear a bit.

Sneezing fit finally over, he turned to the sink and ran the cold water, splashing on it on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked more than a little worse for wear.

Josh patted his face dry — rubbing his eyes would only make them hurt even more — then took a deep breath, trying to relax.

There was a tap on the door.

“You, uh, all right in there, Josh?” asked William Jablonski, a political consultant to the President who’d been pressed into service as his minder and media adviser. Jablonski slurred the “sh”; with his deep voice, it sounded as if he were hushing him.

“Yeah, yeah. Just getting my breath back.”

“The reporters have a few more questions.”

“Yup.”

Josh sat on the closed seat of the toilet and unrolled some more toilet tissue. When he’d been stuck behind the lines in Vietnam, he’d dreamed of the chance to tell the world what he had seen. That goal had kept him going, kept him alive. But at this point he really could use a break. A little more of a rest.

The questions were the same, over and over. He repeated the answers practically word for word:

Where did this happen?

Vietnam, the jungles near the Chinese border.

You saw all of this with your own eyes?

Yes.

How did you escape?

I had a phone — some SEALs were sent. And I guess, uh, some Army guys.

The last answer was, if not quite a lie, certainly not the whole truth. CIA officer Mara Duncan had been the person who found him in the jungle and truly saved him — the CIA had tracked his phone signal, then sent Mara to find and rescue him. But mentioning her — mentioning the agency’s involvement at all — would blow her cover, ending her usefulness in Southeast Asia, and probably ending or at least harming her career.

So he left her out of the answers.

“Josh?” asked Jablonski through the door.

“Yeah?”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m good.”

“The people from WINS have, uh, a deadline thing that they are hoping to meet. They want to talk, uh, about the bridge.”

“I’ll be out in just a sec,” Josh told him.

“Sure.”

The bridge. Someone had tried to blow him up, to stop him from getting to the UN. Those questions were harder to answer, since he wasn’t exactly sure who it was.

He was sure — he saw the man in his mind’s eye: early twenties, thin face, shaved head. Chinese, definitely Chinese.

Determined expression. Cold, hollow eyes.

Can’t they all just go away?

Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself. The people in Vietnam whose bodies he’d seen — they would gladly trade places with him. Mạ, the little girl he’d rescued: What would she think?

Josh rose, blew his nose again, then opened the door.

“All right,” he said to the reporters as he emerged. “Where were we?”

4

Dirk “Hurricane” Silas strode onto the bridge of the McLane, his legs adjusting unconsciously to the gentle roll of the vessel as she plied northward across the South China Sea. No other job in the world could compare with being the master of a ship: no post in the Navy came close to that of captain of a warship. And few moments could compare with those when Commander Silas stepped onto the deck of his bridge. The melding of crew and vessel was never more perfect than that moment, when a glance at the helmsman’s steady hand on the wheel told Silas that the world — that his world — was steady and shipshape.

Silas often thought that he had been born several generations too late; his lust for the sea belonged more properly to the age of sail, when the elements were more immediate and a captain might truly strain his muscles in rallying his crew. But a scan of the bridge of any of the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers would remind even a landlubber that this age had wonders of its own. For a man to stand on this bridge, to know that this ship was under his control, answered to his voice — it was a heady and humbling feeling, and one that Commander Silas had worked all his life to obtain.

“Captain.”

Lieutenant Commander Dorothy Li, Silas’s executive officer, had been taking her turn on the bridge while he grabbed a brief respite. She nodded at him now, and so the routine began: the exchange of data, the trivial and the critical details merging.

The actual give-and-take of commanding a vessel, of keeping her on her course, of making sure her sailors were nourished in mind and spirit and emotion — they were little chinks and dents that accreted against the real core of the thing, the clean sense of duty and honor and courage that informed the soul of a sea captain, of a warrior following a path set by the Norse and beyond. Silas put up with the chinks and dents, attended to the details, because he knew they were the dues he paid for that brief moment on the bridge. He adjusted things deftly, attending to the needs of his ship’s various departments.

He consulted immediately with the chief petty officer who had discovered an unexplained deficiency in the food stores. Ordinarily the chief was the calmest of men, at least in dealing with his commander, but he had become high-strung of late. Tonight, he couldn’t account for two steaks — they were the most important of the items allegedly missing. Silas was reminded of Humphrey Bogart in the Caine Mutiny, and not in a particularly good way.

Almost surely it was an error in the tracking system or someone’s memory, Silas thought; he had no thieves aboard his ship.

It was the borderline hysteria that really bothered Silas. He dealt with it first by making a joke — perhaps the Chinese had somehow snuck aboard the ship — and when that failed to work, gave the chief a reassuring speech and a pat literally on the back. It was stress, he knew; they had been playing chicken with the Chinese now for several days, skirting the bastards’ bullying while obeying orders that prevented them from firing — from even defending themselves properly, in his opinion.

But that was hardly an excuse, and it was rather unseemly in a chief, a man who should be and was in many ways, part of the backbone of Silas’s command. The man would be eased out at Silas’s earliest opportunity. But that opportunity would not come for some time, surely, and as Silas needed him to function to his best ability, he would carry him until then, propping him up as best he could. A pat on the back was easy enough; if it could ease the pressure for a few hours, then Silas was all for it.

He went on to handle a few other minor matters, incidental bits of sand in the smooth grease of his warship’s gears. Internal matters squared away, he turned his attention to external — the real matter at hand.

For days now, they’d been shadowed by a Chinese cruiser and frigate. The Chinese spent most of the time sailing just over the horizon, ducking back and forth as he moved, sometimes across his course, more often dogging his stern. They had briefly attempted to block his path into Vietnam’s coastal waters — a move that could have started a war. They had threatened to interfere with his mission to send a helicopter to pick up a small group of SEALs rescuing some civilians — spies, he assumed, though the group included a small girl.

Whatever. The specifics of their mission didn’t interest him. More to the point was the principle that a U.S. warship went wherever it pleased. He hadn’t fired — doing so would have been against orders — but he had still managed to do his job and to prove the point.

Since then, the McLane had sailed northward toward the Gulf of Tonkin. She was back in international waters, about twenty miles off the Vietnamese coast. Silas’s orders were rather vague — remain off the coast of Vietnam — giving him considerable leeway, though in the end the lack of an actual mission frustrated him. Demonstrating America’s right to be there was hardly the sort of job one pined for.

And so, as he reviewed the evening intelligence briefing and saw the reports of the Chinese amphibious fleet at Hainan, it was not surprising that Silas concluded he did in fact have something to do, and that was to head farther north. For though he had been told not to seek a conflict with either of the two aircraft carriers the Chinese were operating near their home port of Zhenjiang, he had not been ordered away from the amphibious fleet. And in fact, a good naval man would certainly deem it advisable to investigate the whereabouts of that fleet. Certainly in the absence of orders against doing so.

After he had arranged it — and noted that there was no need to alert fleet to his intention, as they would be clear to any observant seaman, let alone to the admiral who was his commander — Silas left the bridge to feel the spray of the ocean. As he lifted the binoculars to his eyes, he thought there was no better feeling in the world than to be standing on the deck of a warship, making his way northward.

And if there was a better feeling, surely it would be his within a few days.

5

Zeus felt his heart pound against his chest. He couldn’t slow it; the best he could do was control his breathing, taking deep, long breaths as he followed the Chinese military officer down the hallway. Christian was a few strides behind; the two Chinese soldiers were a pace or so to the rear.

The worst thing to do was panic. The Chinese had no way of knowing that they were involved in the attack; as long as he kept his mouth shut, they would ultimately have to release him.

Unless the Vietnamese spy had given them away. Then what?

Zeus slowed down another half step. “Let me do the talking,” he whispered to Christian.

“They’ll split us up,” said Christian. “And where’s the girl?”

The tremble was more pronounced, his voice unusually high.

“We’re here on business. Hong Kong. Then Tokyo. We’re businessmen,” said Zeus. “Stay with it.”

“Right.”

The cover story didn’t go very deep. How long would it take to get enough information for inconsistencies? Fifteen minutes? A half hour?

If Solt or one of the Vietnamese marines who’d been on the mission with them had been captured, the Chinese would expect them to lie. But there was no other alternative.

“Stick to the story,” Zeus whispered as the Chinese officer opened a steel door near the gate entrance hall.

“That bitch must’ve sold us out,” said Christian under his breath.

The door opened into a claustrophobically small room flooded with neon-bright light from above. Two men stood at the opposite end of the room. They wore blue fatigues with no insignias. To the right was a large corkboard covered with squares of paper tacked into neat rows. The squares were covered with Chinese characters, all unintelligible to Zeus.

The two men who had followed them came inside and closed the door.

“Passports,” said the officer.

As Zeus reached to his pocket, it occurred to him that it might just be a simple shakedown — not unheard of at small airports in China.

If so, he should slip some cash into the passport before he handed it over. But that was risky, too. The man might be insulted. Worse, it might be too little.

He gave him only the passport. Christian’s hand shook as he handed his over.

Buck up. Don’t go to pieces on me now.

“What’s this about?” Zeus asked calmly.

The officer ignored him, examining the documents. Though the room was small, it had a pair of air-conditioning vents, and it actually seemed cool.

The man said something in Chinese. The two men near the door, barely a foot away from Zeus, stiffened.

“Go with them,” the officer said to him.

“What is this about?” asked Zeus, a little harsher.

“Go.”

“Our passports.”

“Go.”

The officer stared so hard Zeus thought he was going to go crosseyed. The passports remained in his hand.

What would he do if Zeus grabbed them from his hand?

Fight.

Zeus could bowl him over with a swipe of his hand, a hard shot to his throat. Then push against the other two goons behind him, grab one of their guns. But that left the other two men for Christian.

The major had surprised him over the past few days, but he was worn down now, tired by everything they’d done.

And what would they do next? Even if they had their weapons?

One of the men opened the door and stepped back into the hallway. Zeus followed warily, trying to decide what to do next.

“What the hell are they up to?” asked Christian, walking alongside of him. “Are they arresting us? Or what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe they’re going to take us out and shoot us.”

Maybe, thought Zeus.

The man leading them walked toward the main part of the terminal. He took long strides. Zeus quickened his own pace, closing the distance. He glanced over his shoulder; Christian lagged nearly five yards behind, with the other guard a short distance behind him.

This seemed too casual for an arrest. But maybe that was the idea: keep things calm so there was less chance of trouble.

Zeus closed the distance between him and the Chinese soldier. He reached his hand up, plotting what he would do — grab the man’s shoulder, pull him around, hit him with his other fist. But before he was quite close enough, the soldier turned slightly and pushed against a glass door that led to a set of steel stairs outside the building.

Zeus followed. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the harsh light; when they did, he saw an armored personnel carrier sitting about ten yards away. Light spilled from the interior. A half-dozen soldiers sat inside, assault guns between splayed legs, cigarette smoke wafting across the warm night air. There were more soldiers, and more vehicles, a short distance away.

“We are truly fucked,” said Christian, coming down the steps.

The man behind them said something in Chinese; probably Hurry up. Their guide was approaching a large two-and-a-half-ton truck beyond the APC.

Zeus rubbed his face. He’d missed his chance inside. With all these guards around, what the hell was he going to do?

And where the hell was Solt?

6

Mara Duncan stared at Josh MacArthur on the video, watching as he answered the questions from the correspondents a few rooms away. There was no sound; the video was streaming from a security unit, wired to cover the conference room in case of emergencies. But the lack of sound was perfect: it made it easier for Mara to watch him for some answer to the riddle of why she had fallen for the guy.

Because she was definitely attracted to him. Which didn’t make a lot of sense.

Mara swiveled in the chair. The small office was one of several backups scattered throughout the complex. Her UN security escort had ducked out to get them some lunch.

Josh was intellectual, a scientist. She was not. Not that she was dumb, by any means. Going by her grades in college, certainly, she was anything but a dope. But she preferred outdoor things like hiking and waterskiing and even parachute jumping to reading. And when she did read, it was more along the lines of a mystery or something, not a scientific treatise.

What she admired — what she loved — was the way he treated the little girl, Ma. He’d been so tenderly attentive and fiercely protective at the same time.

He had a good smile as well. Boyish. And shoulders — she liked his shoulders, though he wasn’t a bodybuilder type.

Mara thought of the army officer she’d met in Vietnam — Zeus. Now there was a physical type she went for: high school quarterback, super jock, and not a dumb one, either.

Making love to him would be… interesting.

Athletic.

But it’s Josh I want, Mara thought, glancing back at the video screen. Her sat phone buzzed. It was Peter Lucas.

Mara cringed as she answered.

“Boss?”

“Mara, excellent work up there. Those Chinese assassins — dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Secret Service says they are. They’re singing your praises. There’ll be a commendation. Good work. Hell of a job.”

So I guess I don’t have to do any more penance for Malaysia, Mara thought.

“I watched the show. CNN, Fox, everybody’s got it. Your boy is good. Very, very good. You coached him?”

“Some special troubleshooter came down,” said Mara. “Jablonski. The president’s guy. He’s a political handler or something.”

“Well, Josh was great. Very, very convincing.”

“How’s Mạ?”

“The little girl is fine, as far as I know.”

“Can you send somebody to check on her?”

“Don’t go maternal on me, Mara. The girl isn’t my department.”

“I’m not being maternal. She has no family. I’m just looking out for her.”

“You did that in Vietnam, Mara. That part of your job is done.”

“But — ”

“Look, they kept her from having to go in front of the UN, right? She’s in good hands.”

Unless…

“Peter, is my cover blown?” Mara asked.

“No,” he said, a little more slowly than she would have liked. “No. I don’t think so. Listen to me. This would be a good career move.”

“Staying in the field would be better.”

“Well, think about it. You don’t have to make a decision yet.”

“It’s already made up.”

“Take your time.”

“I’m ready to go back now, Peter. I should be in Saigon. Did you find out who ripped off the money that was supposed to be at the drop?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“I’d like to cut his balls off.”

“Mara.” Lucas’s voice had an exasperated tone that Mara recognized as a warning: the next thing out of his mouth would be a long speech about how much she owed him.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Take a few days off. Three or four.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Take one day off at least.” He hung up.

Mara sighed and turned her attention back to the screen. Josh was getting up. The interviews were finally over.

Josh followed wearily as Jablonski and the two bodyguards from the federal marshal’s office squeezed him down the back hallway and hurried him into a stairwell.

“Where are we going now?” Josh asked as they started down.

“We’re going to get you some rest,” answered Jablonski. “At least a few hours. We’re setting up something with Sky News, and a BBC interview. But you should be able to do those by phone. The important things are the morning shows, and we want you better rested for that.”

“Where’s Mara?” asked Josh.

“She’ll be along.”

“I wanted to talk to her.”

Jablonski started to make a face. The BlackBerry in his suit jacket rang; he reached in and took it out, glanced at the face for the caller ID, then held it to his ear.

“This is William. Fred, how are you? Glad you could get back to me.. Jablonski stopped and glanced at Josh. “We might be able to give the congressman a personal briefing. A short one.”

Josh tensed. The earlier “personal briefing” had almost gotten him killed this morning.

“He doesn’t have a lot of time,” Jablonski said. He winked at Josh. “The congressman is? Well, maybe if they were seen walking together…? Hold on.”

Jablonski muted the phone.

“I wonder if you could do a favor,” he told Josh. “There’s a congressman from Long Island who’s going to be in a pretty hard reelection campaign. He’s a reliable vote. If we could help him…”

“Like how?”

“Have your picture taken talking to him.”

“How will that help?”

“One hand washes the other,” said Jablonski, slurping in the end of the sentence. “Don’t worry. It does.”

Josh hated all this political bull. But as Jablonski had explained the other night, Congress was opposed to helping the Vietnamese. It wasn’t going to be easy to change that.

“If we can get out of here when it’s done, then okay,” said Josh.

Jablonski put the phone back to his ear.

“We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Jablonski sent a text, then put the phone away.

“Okay, Josh, it’s all arranged,” said Jablonski. “Let’s go.”

“Where’s Mara?”

“I’ll tell her to meet us. Come on, let’s go.”

A member of the federal marshal’s detail was waiting as Mara stepped off the elevator into the garage below the UN building.

“They just changed plans,” he said. “Mr. Jablonski told the cars to meet them on the street at the back.”

“On the street? That makes no sense.”

The marshal shrugged.

“Somebody tried to kill him this morning,” said Mara. “He has to be protected.”

“The whole area’s sealed off,” said the marshal.

“You can’t think this is a good idea.”

“What do you want me to tell you? I’m just following orders. There’s tons of security around, ma’am. Tons.”

Mara hated when anyone called her ma’am.

“Just take me to wherever the hell they are.”

The marshal turned and walked across the smooth concrete of the underground parking garage. A few hours before, the place had been swarming with Secret Service men, some of them armed with submachine guns. But that was mostly because the President was here. Now the only security people she could spot were a pair of New York City policemen standing at the far end of garage, near the ramp to street level.

But maybe that made sense. The Chinese wouldn’t kill Josh now; that would just prove his point. They would create a martyr.

She followed the marshal back up the stairs to the first floor, then out into the main lobby. There were a dozen photographers and several video crews crowded near the door. They glanced in her direction, then realized she was nobody and went back to waiting, hoping to get a look at Josh as he left.

The marshal led her through the throng to a section of roped-off elevators. They went up a flight, then out and across the hall to a staircase at the back of the building. These led to the long hallway flanking the General Assembly Chamber. Television lights flooded the space, glaring off the art displayed along the temporary wall at Mara’s left. Diplomats were clustered at the far end, listening to someone give an impromptu news interview.

It was Josh. His voice, soft, tired, echoed through the hall. He was talking about Vietnam, what he had seen there.

As Mara approached the back of the crowd, it began to move. A uniformed security guard glanced at her as she approached, then turned back, spotting the UN VIP identification tag hanging around her neck. Mara followed along, not wanting to draw any attention to herself.

The procession grew as they pushed outside, swelling as reporters who’d missed the impromptu interview inside realized from the commotion that they would have another chance. A few shouted questions from the side. Mara spotted Jablonski guiding Josh around the side of the building, toward a pair of Lincoln town cars. A line of NYPD officers blocked the cars from the rest of the lot; as the reporters realized they were about to be cut off, they swarmed around, temporarily blocking the way.

Josh stopped and raised his hands.

“All right, I’ll take questions. Whatever you want.” His voice was hoarse. It sounded as tired as the first night she’d found him in Vietnam.

“We only have a few minutes,” said Jablonski. Mara couldn’t quite see his head through the crowd. “Then Mr. MacArthur has to brief Congressman Joyce. I’m sure you understand.”

The reporters started asking questions, the same ones Josh had been fielding for hours:

What were you doing in Vietnam?

How did you escape?

How did you get the images?

Was anyone left alive?

He answered wearily, but patiently. His answers were getting shorter and shorter.

Poor guy, thought Mara. He was exhausted. Couldn’t they see that?

Mara sidled around the edge of the crowd, moving to position herself closer to the line of policemen, trying to catch Jablonski’s eye. Her escort had disappeared.

The back door of the second town car opened. A tall, thin man with slicked-back gray hair unfolded himself from the interior, popping up like the inside of birthday card. He had his jacket off, white shirtsleeves rolled up, and tie fluttering in the wind as he strode forward.

He was a congressman or some other politician, Mara realized. One more episode in Jablonski’s dog-and-pony show, designed to please friends and to influence enemies.

She slipped behind a cameraman, pushing gently toward Josh and Jablonski. But the policemen nearest her pivoted, forming a wedge as the congressman approached. They were in her way.

Deciding it would be easier to go around to the other side of the scrum, Mara backed out, squeezing between two latecomers. Walking along the edge of the crowd, she looked for the marshal who’d accompanied her earlier. There were a few people standing around, employees she guessed, watching the proceedings. One or two smoked cigarettes.

A silver Lexus LX 470 pulled up near the entrance. Someone got out — a young Asian woman. She was dressed in a flower-print pink skirt, knee-length, with a tightly tailored business jacket. Her long hair was tied at the back. She wore glasses, but these softened her features, making her look interested rather than studious.

She waved her credentials at one of the police officers, and gestured back toward the main security post by the street. Meanwhile a young man in jeans and a blue blazer got out of the other side of the car, from the front seat, and hustled after her, carrying a video camera. The policeman waved her past.

Mara looked at the car. The windows were blacked out. What television news service drove around in a Lexus?

Josh did his best not to grimace as the congressman talked about the heinous crimes to mankind, naked aggression, and the need for immediate congressional hearings to determine the proper course of action.

“We don’t need hearings,” muttered Josh.

Jablonski poked him gently in the ribs.

“What about hearings?” asked one of the reporters nearby.

“He said they need them,” said another.

“We don’t need them. The Chinese need to stop their attacks,” said Josh in frustration.

The congressman turned to glare at him. For a just a moment his eyes narrowed into daggers. Josh wouldn’t have been surprised if a laser beam shot from them and burned away his tongue. He didn’t care.

“Our scientist friend is right,” said the congressman, the glare replaced by a fresh smile. “Action. Hopefully my colleagues in Congress will see it that way. Now, come on, I know you have several appointments. We’ll talk on the way.”

Jablonski took hold of Josh’s arm. Josh looked over the crowd and saw Mara twenty or thirty feet away.

“Mara!” he yelled, resisting Jablonski’s soft pull. “Mara!”

He waved. Jablonski stopped.

“It’s Mara,” Josh told him.

Jablonski turned to one of the marshals. The marshal nodded, then went to get Mara. She was already walking toward them.

“You are a liar, Mr. MacArthur!” shouted a voice from the crowd. “I don’t know how you sleep at night!”

Josh stopped short. The accusation felt like a physical blow to the back of his neck.

“What? What?”

“Those photos we see — aren’t they made up?”

Josh couldn’t see the woman who was making the accusation. Where was she?

“Why would I make that up?” said Josh. He wasn’t even sure who he was answering.

The reporters nearest Josh stepped aside to reveal a young Asian-looking woman with glasses — the one Mara had seen getting out of the car. She had a pad in her hand; her videographer was filming over her shoulder.

“Where did you get the photos?” the woman asked.

“In Vietnam. Northern Vietnam.”

“Where precisely?”

Her voice was sweet, not shrill. Now that she was close, she spoke almost softly. Her English had a slight accent — Chinese, Josh thought, though he couldn’t really be sure.

“It was near the border,” said Josh. “We had established a camp — ”

“It’s okay, Josh. She’s trying to provoke you,” whispered Jablonski in his ear. “She’s probably some sort of spy. Let’s go.”

“I didn’t make anything up,” said Josh. “We were north of a place called Ba Sin Sui Ho. I may not be pronouncing it right. We were studying climate change, its effects on the jungle and the life there.”

“It’s all right, Josh,” repeated Jablonski. “Come on. Mara’s here. Let’s go.”

“I’m not lying,” he told Jablonski.

“They’re trying to provoke you. Don’t let them.” Jablonski looked up at the reporters. “You have all the data on the images and the approximate location of the massacre,” he said loudly. “You can download all of the information off the State Department Web site.”

Josh was trembling as he got into the car.

“She called me a liar,” he said as Mara slipped in next to him.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, son,” said Congressman Joyce on the other side of Josh. “These reporters — they spout bull just to get your reaction.”

“I doubt that was a reporter,” said Jablonski, who’d gotten into the front. “Probably a Chinese spy.”

He leaned over the seat.

“Can you check on it?” he asked Mara.

“Sure,” she said, wishing he hadn’t said anything.

“I think it went very well, all things considered,” said the congressman. He slapped Josh on the knee, then looked across to Mara. “And you are…?”

“Mara Duncan.”

“I take it you’re with the FBI?” He glanced at Jablonski.

“State Department,” said Jablonski. “She’s our liaison.”

“Good, very good,” said the congressman, sitting back.

Mara looked at Josh. He was sweating, and staring at her.

“I don’t think it’s a big deal,” Mara told him. “Relax.”

“I know what I saw. I was right there. We were right there.”

“I know you did, Josh,” said Mara. “Don’t worry.”

7

Zeus emptied his mind as he walked, focusing entirely on his surroundings. The airport was a collection of bright lights and shadows, blinking beacons and looming buildings. The runway was a good distance away, more than a hundred yards. Beyond it were four black lumps — military hangars, he guessed, as the other half of the airport was used by the People’s Liberation Army’s air force.

So don’t run that way when you make your break.

Light from the interior of the terminal building washed over the apron where the planes were parked, tinting everything yellow. The planes themselves were unlit, seemingly without power or crews. That killed any temptation he might have had to fantasize about boarding one and hijacking it.

And there were simply too many soldiers around to think about running, much less overpowering them. Another truck crossed ahead at the end of the terminal building; as it passed, a floodlight on the building illuminated the faces of five men hanging from the back, giving them a ghostly pallor.

“What, do they have the whole damn Chinese army here?” grumbled Christian, a little louder than Zeus would have liked.

“They’re under attack, remember?”

“What the hell are we going to do?” Christian asked. “Where are they taking us?”

Zeus had no answers. Better to go along, say nothing, hope for the best.

Hope isn’t a plan.

That was his tactical instructor’s motto at West Point. Zeus wondered how he’d deal with this. That was one thing they didn’t teach you at the Point: how to be a successful spy.

As they drew parallel to the end of the terminal gate building, the soldier leading them turned right about forty-five degrees, and began walking across a long, open area toward another building. A row of armored personnel carriers sat to his right, about thirty yards away, blocking off part of the apron area.

Zeus went into G-2 mode, assessing the vehicles as an intelligence officer would. They were short and squat, with turrets toward the rear of the hull: NVH-1s, very old vehicles, with 30mm or 25 mm guns in the turret. They’d hold nine soldiers, plus two crewmen.

You’d expect older gear on Hainan, so that fit.

Had they been upgraded? The Chinese got a lot of use out of their older vehicles by outfitting them with the latest technology.

A single radio whip off the turret. Not enough to go on.

So where had they come from?

Probably they were kept on the military side and just rushed over, assigned to take up positions in case the Vietnamese counterattacked. It would be standard procedure.

How many?

One company at least. How many had he passed now? How many were on the other side of the building?

Were they army or air force? How were the Chinese divisions organized — would these be attached to a regular division, or a separate unit?

There were two self-propelled antiaircraft guns in the distance, close to the runway; he could see the barrels rising above the hulls.

Two barrels. Which made them… what?

Russian ZSU-57s?

No way. Too old.

They weren’t aligned very well for defense. The positioning was the sort of thing you would see if you were expecting some sort of civil disturbance.

They were still in that mode, not quite ready for the war they were actually fighting.

A vehicle moved from the shadows ahead. It had its running lights but not its headlights on. At first glance, Zeus thought it was a sedan, but as it approached he realized it was a crew cab pickup. There were soldiers standing in the back, leaning over the roof.

The man who had been leading them raised his hand as it pulled up. There were two soldiers sitting in the front seat. The man opened the rear passenger side door and gestured toward Zeus.

“We can’t get in,” whispered Christian. “Who the hell knows where they’re taking us?”

“We don’t really have much choice at this point,” Zeus told him. “Just relax. We’ll get through this.”

“Fuck you, relax.”

“Listen to me. Just play along — we’re businessmen. Do not change your story.”

“Businessmen get arrested by half the army?”

Zeus climbed in. The cab smelled funny — like roasted peanuts, he thought.

Neither of the two men in front said anything. The soldiers who had escorted them slammed the door shut after Christian got in.

“What the hell?” hissed Christian.

Zeus shook his head. The truck started forward in a gentle glide, barely moving at first, then gradually picking up speed. It moved toward the terminal building, on the opposite side from where they’d come out. The personnel carriers were on their right. Then the driver found a road marked with reflectors across the wide asphalt concourse and turned sharply. Their speed gradually increased as they moved away from the terminal building. They passed some maintenance vehicles, then slowed as they approached a hangar.

A two-engined Fokker 50 passenger plane sat out front. The truck stopped.

Zeus pulled the door handle next to him, only to find it was secured by a lock that allowed it to be opened only from the outside.

They sat in the dark for a moment. Zeus considered the odds of overpowering both men in the front. He could strangle the driver easily enough; could Christian take the other?

Push the man aside, flip over the seat — he’d probably be able to make it before anyone in the bed behind them or outside could react. Once in the driver’s seat, he could simply back up, drive around to the front.

Desperation move.

Was it better than just doing nothing?

Yes.

He was just turning to Christian, intending on miming what he wanted to do, when the door next to him opened.

It was Solt Jan. “Out. On the plane. Let’s go!” she ordered.

Zeus took a slow breath as he pushed out of the truck. Solt was already halfway to the plane.

“What the hell?” asked Christian under his breath.

Zeus followed Solt to the stairs leading to the aircraft. He walked deliberately, trying to observe the surroundings without being too obvious. There were some mechanics or maintenance personnel in the hangar, but no soldiers.

He glanced back at Christian, who was still back near the truck.

Was Christian thinking of making a break for it?

Don’t, thought Zeus. Play this through.

Christian started walking. He was mumbling when he reached the steps.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“There’s probably food on the plane.”

“Right.”

Zeus went up and found Solt waiting just inside the door.

“Take the seats in row six,” she whispered. She handed him their passports. “Say nothing.”

“Where are we going?”

“Say nothing,” she hissed. “Good luck.”

8

Premier Cho Lai folded his arms as the defense minister continued. He was losing the struggle to keep his temper.

“The attack a few hours ago on our invasion fleet illustrates a capacity we had not realized the Vietnamese had,” continued Lo Gong. He turned to the large display at the front of the war room. “There have been attacks on the harbor, and encounters all along the coast. We dare not move the fleet forward until we have cleared the waters.”

“How many were true encounters, and how many were sailors having panic attacks?” said General Qingyun Pu sharply. It was not a question. Qingyun headed the air force, and was Cho Lai’s most aggressive general.

“We have images of the attack and casualty reports,” answered Lo Gong. “We’ve already lost two patrol boats and several landing craft. Perhaps the air force believes it can do a better job.”

“We could flatten Vietnam in a day.”

“You haven’t even conquered Hanoi,” answered Gong.

“Enough,” said Cho Lai. The premier liked Qingyun Pu, but the defense minister had a point. “What is the impact on our plans?”

“We are shifting our resources,” said the general. “We will be ready to launch a different attack along the coast within hours.”

“Good.”

“The next question is what the American Navy will do,” said Lo Gong. He pointed to a spot near the southern Vietnamese coast. “The American destroyer sent to test the blockade has been moving north. We are continuing to shadow him. At the moment, it is the nearest vessel. Most of the American fleet is near Taiwan.”

“How do we know the destroyer didn’t launch the attack?” asked the premier.

“The destroyer was out of range, Your Excellency.”

“What about an American submarine?”

The defense minister lowered his gaze. “As for an American submarine, I can assure you, the Americans would have made a much larger attack. We have our aircraft carrier to worry about. No, this was a surprise and beyond what we thought the Vietnamese could launch, but far less than the American capacity. They are still out of the war. They are afraid to attack.”

Cho Lai kept his thoughts on that subject to himself.

The discussion continued. The main thrust of the Chinese army had been slowed by the destruction of the dams west of Hanoi. The flood-waters were gradually subsiding, and the attack could be resumed within a few days. Ho Chi Minh City would be theirs within a week.

“Assuming the political winds remain in our favor,” said the defense minister.

“I will worry about the winds,” said Cho Lai. “You push our generals to be more aggressive. They act like old women, afraid of their own shadows.”

Cho Lai still pondered Lo Gung’s assessment of the Americans a half hour later as he sat in his office, listening to the latest intelligence briefing on the UN speech. The American president was certainly doing his best to urge a confrontation.

The intelligence reports said American public opinion was against intervention. Cho Lai wasn’t so sure.

Even with their well-documented decline, the Americans were a force that must be dealt with carefully. Militarily, they were still ahead of the Chinese in many areas — not all, however, and the gap was closing rapidly, but Cho Lai knew it was best to avoid direct conflict for at least another year, perhaps two or even three. He needed the time not so much to catch up with their weaponry — the estimate there was closer to a year and a half — but to get his people healthy again. The drought that had spread from western China had devastated much of the rural population. The impact could be measured in calories — the average peasant in Yunnan Province ate five hundred calories per day.

Five hundred. A quarter of what was needed to live. Those who had fled to the cities fared somewhat better, but even in the places where food was plentiful, wages were unable to keep up. He was not surprised that there had been food riots; the wonder was that there hadn’t been more.

Just enough to bring him to power. But surely that wouldn’t last. He needed Vietnam, its oil, but mostly its rice, its soil, and its climate. And he needed Cambodia and Thailand. The shifting of the weather patterns had favored them all at China’s expense.

“Your Excellency?”

Cho Lai looked up. His intelligence minister, Ludi Yan, had returned to his office after taking a call outside.

“The agent we sent almost reached him on the bridge,” said Ludi Yan. “But the plan fell short.”

Cho Lai nodded.

“The man — we believe he died. We are looking for his body.”

“Better that he is dead than captured.”

Ludi nodded.

“We have already begun blunting the American propaganda,” continued the intelligence minister. He handed Cho Lai a touchpad tablet. There was a video in the middle of the screen, poised to play. The premier touched the arrow. A scene outside the UN began to play, showing a press conference the scientist had held.

“I have no time for more of his lies,” said Cho Lai.

“Wait for a moment, Your Excellency It will pause.”

The camera moved to the right, looking over the crowd. Then the image stopped on a young American woman. Her face zoomed to fill half the screen. Next to it, a black presentation-type slide came up.

“She was called the Dark Horse in Malaysia, we believe,” said Ludi. “A very skilled operative.”

“A woman.”

“A CIA officer who has accompanied the scientist. Who is to say that she did not plant the information for him to discover?”

“His story is that he witnessed the massacre,” said Cho Lai.

“He ran from the camp where the other scientists were, so he doesn’t know what happened there. We have already begun to attack his credibility. Videos have been prepared. We have several operatives ready to contact media. It will be a subtle, but all-out campaign.”

Cho Lai frowned.

“If you do not wish us to proceed, Your Excellency — ”

“Do what you can to discredit him,” said Cho Lai. “Do not harm the scientist. That will only make it look as if we are guilty. As for this girl — kill her if it is convenient. That would bring some measure of satisfaction for our agent’s demise.”

“It will be done.” Ludi bowed deeply, then left the room.

9

For the briefest of moments, George Chester Greene thought he was going to get everything he wanted: a near unanimous censure of China in the UN, a vote in the Senate and House to provide troops to enforce a cease-fire in Vietnam, and a ten-point boost in his approval rating.

The last was always a pipe dream, but with Josh MacArthur’s dramatic appearance before the UN, the first two seemed well within his grasp. Yet within hours, everything began to disintegrate. The UN vote was postponed by Iran, either as a payback for oil deals between it and China, or as the latest in a campaign to tweak America’s nose — or very likely both. Senator Phillip Grasso, who had been among Greene’s biggest critics since the start of his presidency, had fallen into line, thanks largely to a thwarted attempt by the Chinese to kill him and Josh Mac-Arthur as they traveled together in New York. But Grasso’s influence in the Senate only went so far, and as soon as he came out in favor of intervention, the antis began mounting an offensive.

Then there were the lies from China itself. Greene knew the Chinese would attempt to pass off the American information as so much propaganda. What he hadn’t quite expected was how much the news media would play up that angle. Every story he saw seemed to focus on the Chinese counterarguments, rather than the clear evidence Josh MacArthur had brought back.

Greene had seen a confrontation coming with China for a long, long time. But the one thing he hadn’t seen was that it would be over Vietnam.

It was a supreme irony. He’d spent several months at the end of the Vietnam War as a prisoner in Hanoi. And now he was trying to figure out a way to save the bastards.

Not for them. China, and more specifically its despotic premier, had to be stopped. Vietnam was clearly intended as just the first of Cho Lai’s coveted prizes. The rest of Indo-China really would fall easily. The question was where would they go after that: Taiwan? Japan, perhaps?

Greene got off the exercise bike. The first time he had used it in Air Force One, he had thought it very strange indeed — he was literally pedaling at just under the speed of sound. Now, like much he had experienced in his brief tenure as President, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

He poked his head out the door of his private room. His national security director, Walter Jackson, was sitting on the couch of the executive office, talking to the National Security situation room for an update.

“Walter, I’m going to take a shower,” said the President.

“Mr. President, a moment?”

“All right,” said Greene, frowning.

Jackson hung up. “Can we get Lin in here?”

Linda Holmes was the legislative coordinator.

“It’s your meeting, Walter.”

Greene stooped down to the small beverage refrigerator. He paused over the selections — a beer would go down pretty well right now — then pulled out a bottle of water.

Linda Holmes came into the conference room holding a large binder in front of her chest. Now just past fifty, in younger years she was quite a beauty. Greene still found her attractive, though there wasn’t a hint of flirtation between them. It would have gone nowhere in any event — she’d just celebrated her thirty-year marriage anniversary.

“Mr. President.”

“Drink?” asked Greene, settling down on the couch.

“I just had coffee.”

“How’s it look?”

“Well.” Holmes opened the binder. She had an iPad 3 in the pocket. She fired it up, then flipped about midway through her book. She tapped the iPad twice, coordinating whatever was on the screen with her documents. “You need eight more votes.”

“In the House?” asked Greene.

“That’s the Senate. The House is even tougher.”

Greene cursed. Now he really wished he’d chosen the beer.

“It’s because it’s Vietnam that’s being attacked,” she added. “Anywhere else, even Taiwan — ”

“I know,” said Greene. “All right. Just tell me: Is there any hope?”

She made a face Greene had seen all too often in his short tenure as president. He called it the Bad News Grimace — I don’t want to be the one to tell you this, sir, but…

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” said Holmes. “If you could make some calls, it might help.”

“Give me a list,” said Greene.

Holmes tapped her iPad. The printer at the far end of the room began humming.

“I’ll let you know how I do,” said Greene.

He got up. As Holmes left, he took a swig from the water bottle and turned toward the back to his private suite.

“George?”

“Yes, Walter?”

“Are you thinking of sending the troops without the authorization?” asked the national security director.

“Possibly.”

“That’s risky. Legally.”

“Agreed.”

“The worst thing would be to send them too late.”

“I’m well aware of that, Walter. Do you mind if I take a shower now?”

“Couple of other things,” said Jackson. “The operation against Hainan seems to have been successful. NSA has intercepts telling the fleet to look for Vietnamese submarines. The admiral who was supposed to lead the invasion force has been recalled to Beijing for consultation.”

“Excellent.”

“Yes and no. There’s still a sizeable force on Hainan. They won’t stay there forever. And the CIA thinks there’s some sort of operation being planned against Hai Phong. The details are sketchy.”

“What sort of operation?”

Jackson shrugged. “Details are sketchy.”

“Get a hold of Frost and tell him to sharpen it up,” snapped Greene. Peter Frost was the head of the CIA. “Tell him to stop sending me the latest fake YouTube and Twitter posts, and get real intelligence.”

“One other thing you should know, George,” added Jackson, his voice notably lower. “The two American Army officers involved in the Hainan operation as advisers? They’re missing.”

“Missing where?”

“Hainan.”

Greene pursed his lips. Just what he needed — another public relations nightmare.

“Very possibly they’re dead,” added Jackson.

It was a horrible thought, yet in this circumstance their deaths would be far more desirable than their capture.

A terrible thought, especially for him. Would Nixon have thought that about his capture? And yet it was certainly true for the country.

Or at least for him.

Was that the same thing?

Absolutely not. He had to be clear about that.

“Keep me advised,” Greene told Jackson, opening the door to his private suite.

10

Zeus relaxed a little as the Fokker 50 lifted from the runway. They were off Hainan at least. The farther from the scene of the crime, the better.

The turboprops made a loud, droning noise that reminded him quite a lot of the turbocharger he’d installed in his old Firebird.

Odd to be thinking of the ‘Bird now. She wasn’t nearly as nice as the Corvette he’d kept, but she had been a pretty car in her own right, old-school muscle and gas guzzler. He’d done a good job with her, and she’d paid him back nicely, returning a decent premium over what he’d paid when he sold her to a millionaire on eBay. At least he assumed the guy was a millionaire; he didn’t even bark about the price.

The Fokker banked sharply, pushing Zeus against Christian.

“Something’s up,” Christian told Zeus. “We’re turning north.”

“Solt’s got it under control.” She was sitting a few aisles away.

“I’ll bet.”

“You come up with a better plan, let me know.”

Casually glancing to his right and then left, Zeus tried to get a read on the other passengers. He could only see a handful. They were all Asian, probably Chinese. They didn’t seem particularly worried or thrilled to have escaped Hainan. He thought of striking up a conversation to see what they knew of the situation on the island, but decided it was too risky; there was no sense calling more attention to himself.

Zeus unbuckled his seatbelt.

“Where are you going?” asked Christian. There was panic in his eyes.

“Bathroom.”

Zeus glanced at the faces of the passengers as he walked toward the back of the cabin.

No other Europeans. Mostly men, mostly in formal business clothes. His own clothes, a baggy pair of cotton pants and a Western-style sweatshirt with a pseudo designer name, were probably among the most casual on the plane.

The restrooms were occupied. Zeus turned back toward the cabin, hoping that Solt Jan had seen him and would follow. But she didn’t.

The door to one of the commodes opened. Zeus stepped back to let a short, thin woman squeeze past. Then he went inside the restroom.

He needed to wash his face. The salt water from the ocean felt as if it had embedded itself into his pores. He rubbed the water from the faucet into his forehead and down across his cheekbones, to his jaw and chin. He filled his palms again and ran them over his face, trying to flush the salt and fatigue away.

He avoided looking in the mirror, knowing he looked terrible. He took a quick glance at his clothes — stolen from a gym locker, but reasonably close in size — then opened the door and went back out to his seat.

“We’re going to Zhanjiang,” whispered Christian as he sat down.

“How do you know?”

“Solt told me. She came by while you were in the restroom.”

“Okay.”

“She says there’re flights from there to Beijing. From there we can go anywhere. I’m not crazy about going to Beijing.”

“There’s always Pyongyang,” Zeus answered sarcastically, referring to the capital of North Korea.

“You’re a real comedian.”

“Did she say how long the flight was?”

“Didn’t ask.”

Zeus leaned over, trying to see through the window next to Christian. If they were going to Zhanjiang, it shouldn’t take very long. They would fly directly over the island, cross a small strait, and then reach the mainland not far from the city.

“Not even anything to read,” grumbled Christian.

“We’ll be down soon.”

“Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that.”

The pilot began speaking over the loudspeaker in Chinese. There was some rustling in the seats as he went on.

Zeus waited for him to finish, hoping he would repeat the announcement in English, but he didn’t. Finally, he leaned across the aisle.

“Excuse me,” he said to the sleepy-eyed man sitting opposite him. “I don’t speak Chinese. I wonder if you could tell me what he said.”

The man simply stared at him.

Two rows ahead, Solt Jan heard him talking and turned her head back. She got up and came back, kneeling down next to his seat. She looked as if she were genuflecting.

“The plane is diverting because of the war emergency,” she told him in a whisper.

“Uh-huh.”

“Zhanjiang is closed,” she added, her voice even softer. “The pilot didn’t say, but we are most likely going to Beihai. We will be able to continue from there.”

She shook her head, telling Zeus not to ask any more questions.

“Small airport,” she whispered. “But adequate.”

“We’re in your hands.”

She nodded, then went back to her seat. The aircraft had begun banking gently westward,

“Why do you think they closed Zhanjiang?” Christian asked.

“Need it for military operations,” said Zeus. “Has to be.” Probably in response to our fake attack, he thought. Zeus guessed there would be extra patrol flights now, the Chinese military in high paranoid mode.

Good. Though not necessarily for them.

The airplane leveled off. The harsh drone of its engines eased. Zeus wondered about the Vietnamese air force. They still had some flyable MiGs, but he doubted they’d risk them this far from their base. In fact, he tended to doubt that they’d risk them at all.

“We’re over the water,” said Christian a few minutes later.

“What can you see?”

“Lights. I think I can see a boat. A ship, I mean. There’s the coast.”

Obviously, the Chinese didn’t think the Vietnamese air force was much of a threat, or there’d be a blackout.

The airplane suddenly dipped down. Something flew past Christian’s window.

“Shit,” said Christian.

“Sshhh,” said Zeus. Bat everyone else was talking, and pushing toward the windows near them.

“Fighters,” said Christian.

“What are they doing?”

Christian didn’t answer as the Fokker suddenly dipped down again. Zeus felt his stomach rising in his chest, and fought back a gag response.

Christian reached for the barf bag. So did several other passengers as the Fokker turned sharply eastward, tucking its left wing down and then pivoting even harder onto its right.

Zeus strained against the seatbelt, then felt himself pushed back as they leveled off. He wanted to look out the window, but Christian was in the way, getting sick. Zeus turned toward the aisle, trying to keep his own stomach from feeling too queasy.

The pilot came on with another announcement. His words seemed to come more quickly than before, though Zeus could only guess at what he was saying.

Don’t worry. All is routine.

The plane leveled off. After a few moments, Zeus braved a glance at Christian.

“Maybe we should change seats,” he suggested.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“You all right?”

“No.”

Zeus stepped into the aisle, then slipped in as Christian got out of the way.

A set of lights blinked beyond the wing. One of the planes that had buzzed them earlier was now flying parallel to the Fokker. Zeus guessed it was a fighter, and that they had inadvertently strayed into a military area.

That didn’t seem to make much sense, though — they were still out over the water.

Then he saw lights in the distance. At first, he thought he had spotted a city; then he realized he was looking at one of the Chinese aircraft carriers.

Zeus pushed against the glass, trying to get a better view. The Chinese had two carriers. The last he had heard was that they were operating together. But he could see only one.

Something was landing on it. From this distance it was impossible to tell what kind of plane.

Zeus turned his attention to the dots of light near the larger ship. They were escorts. The Navy probably already knew exactly which ships they were, how they were equipped, even who their captains were. Very possibly an unmanned spy plane was watching them at this very moment. Still, this was a real intelligence opportunity: Zeus studied the dots, trying to memorize the pattern. Two small ships flanking the carrier, with a larger ship to the south. Three other vessels behind, to the north. Two seemed relatively large and wide; he guessed they were supply vessels of some sort, with their own escort.

When they were past the last of the ships, the aircraft on the wing veered away. A cone of orange appeared at the back of the gray fuselage, changing from a circle to an ellipse as it made its turn. Zeus stared after it. When he finally turned his attention back to the cabin, he saw that the stewardesses were handing out towels. They were landing soon.

“You okay?” he asked Christian.

“Better. Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“Funny thing is, I feel hungry now.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t push that.”

Zeus went back to looking out the window. He couldn’t see any more lights, just a dull, orange-brown glow ahead to his left. He glanced at his watch: fifteen past three.

Where had the time gone? And yet it had seemed to pass so slowly.

Ten minutes later, the plane began to bank in the direction of the glow. By now, it looked like a pale yellow foam rising from the crust of the blackness below. Zeus guessed it was Beihai, where they were headed.

The pilot confirmed it with an announcement a few seconds later. The only word Zeus recognized was the name of the city.

He tightened his seatbelt and waited patiently as the plane put down, the engines growing into a loud roar as the wheels hit the tarmac. The passengers applauded as the pilot feathered the engines and gently nudged the brakes.

The plane stopped a good distance from the terminal. A pair of buses waited nearby. Zeus watched a moveable stairway being pushed close to the fuselage.

The passengers got their things together, then filed out slowly, silently, no doubt wondering like Zeus and Christian what they were going to do next.

Solt was a few passengers ahead of them. Zeus angled to the left as he neared the bottom of the steps, intending to catch up. But as he reached the bottom of the stairs, the attendant standing there tapped his shoulder.

“This bus,” she said in English. “That one is full.”

Zeus turned dutifully and led the rest of the passengers to the second vehicle. The driver smiled and nodded as he boarded, greeting him in Chinese. Zeus found a seat a few rows back.

Christian slid in next to him silently. Zeus guessed that he was embarrassed that he’d gotten sick, though he had plenty of company.

The bus was quiet. When the last passenger had found a seat, the driver closed the door and put the vehicle into motion, gliding across the blacktop toward a two-story building about two hundred and fifty yards away. He stopped behind the first bus, which had already discharged its passengers.

Humming to himself, he opened the door, said something to the passengers in the front row, then hopped down the steps and trotted over to the building. No one moved; apparently he had told everyone to wait.

Zeus watched as the driver spoke to a pair of policemen standing next to a glass door, then ran back, hopped up the steps, and then said something in Chinese that Zeus assumed meant, “Everyone off the bus.” The passengers rose slowly and began filing out.

Zeus rubbed his temples as he joined the small herd walking toward the door. He hadn’t slept now for more than a day, not counting assorted fitful turning in a cot aboard one of the boats they’d commandeered. He hadn’t slept all that well for a few days before that, either.

The glass door opened on a narrow hallway, with rooms on the left and right. The passengers were directed to the room at the right, which was well lit by overhead fluorescents. It was a medium-sized office, bereft of furniture.

They organized themselves along the far wall. No one from the first bus was here; Solt was nowhere to be seen.

“Damn,” grumbled Christian, standing next to him. “I feel like I’m back in beast barracks.”

“A lot worse than this.”

“I guess.” Beast barracks was West Point slang for the freshman orientation period, traditionally a test for newcomers. Outright hazing by upperclassmen was no longer permitted, but the older students still found a way to make things hard for the new arrivals.

Christian cupped his face with his hands. “I gotta get out of here and get some rest.”

“I know what you mean,” answered Zeus. “We’ll have a chance soon. They’re probably just figuring out hotels and stuff.”

“Where’s Solt?”

Zeus shook his head.

A man in a dark suit came into the room after the passengers. He told them something in Chinese that didn’t seem to please anyone. They began murmuring and making clucking sounds with their tongues. The man behind Zeus said something out loud that made the airline official redden. The two men began arguing; other passengers joined in. Finally, the airline official left.

“What the hell is going on?” Christian asked.

“Does anyone here speak English?” asked Zeus, deciding there was no sense keeping quiet anymore.

A young woman — the only woman in their group — said something in Chinese, which prompted one of the older men near them to begin speaking to them. It was clear he was trying to explain the predicament, but Zeus had no way of understanding the words. He listened as carefully as he could, and nodded to encourage the man to continue, but the sounds flowed over him like the ocean.

“Let’s go find somebody that can help us,” insisted Christian. “Or at least get to Solt. Hell.”

“She may not be using that name,” said Zeus.

“I don’t care anymore,” said Christian. “I want to get the hell out of here. I feel claustrophobic.”

“Relax.”

“Don’t tell me that anymore,” said Christian, starting for the door. “My head’s going to explode.”

The airline official who’d been speaking inside was talking to another employee in the hallway. Christian strode up to him and in a loud voice demanded to know what was going on.

The airline official briefly glanced at him, then went back to his own intense discussion with his fellow employee.

Christian grabbed his shoulder. “What’s going on?”

The airline official jumped away from Christian’s grip.

“Easy, Win,” Zeus told Christian. “You’re not helping. He doesn’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

The airline official stepped back, hands out in horror. His companion began backing up the hall.

“He didn’t mean anything,” Zeus told them. “He’s just a little tired.”

The airline officials exchanged a look, then retreated farther into the building.

“Let’s go after them,” said Christian. “There has to be somebody who works for the airline who speaks English.”

“They’ll get somebody. Wait,” said Zeus. But Christian had already started after them.

Reluctantly, Zeus followed in the direction that the two men had taken. A pair of policemen stood in the hallway just around the corner, blocking the way.

“Excuse me,” said Christian.

Neither man moved. Zeus saw that Christian’s face was beet red again, and his voice was shaky.

“Do you speak English?” Zeus asked the policemen. “A little? We’re trying to find out what’s going on. No one seems to be able to help us.”

The man on the right said something in a sharp tone, then pointed behind them, indicating they should return to the room.

“What if we don’t want to go back?” snapped Christian.

The policeman began gesticulating, thrusting his finger toward Christian’s chest as he spoke in a rapid and clearly angry Chinese staccato.

Zeus suddenly had a premonition of what was going to happen.

“No!” he yelled, reaching for Christian.

But it was too late.

“I’m not taking this shit anymore!” said Christian, launching a left hook that caught his antagonist square in the side of the head.

11

Once the interviews were finished, the Marshal Service took Mara and Josh to a motel in eastern Pennsylvania where they could rest and not be bothered for the rest of the night. But even though they had rented an entire floor of the motel, they were concerned enough about security to tell Mara that she couldn’t go out for a walk by herself.

Josh went right to bed, and fell asleep as soon as he’d pulled the thin blanket over his chest. He slept soundly, and woke smoothly and quickly, rising in the unfamiliar room about a half hour before dawn.

The heat was on, but after Vietnam, it felt cold. He pulled on a sweatshirt, then went to take a walk.

“Hey now, where do you think you’re going, son?” asked the marshal sitting in the hallway when he emerged from his room. He had a Texas accent, accentuated by a pair of scuffed boots that poked far out of his pant legs.

“Walk,” said Josh.

“Uh, not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

The Texan blinked at him.

Josh shrugged and went to the stairs. The marshal hesitated for a moment, then got up to follow.

The crisp air outside felt bracing. The motel was located at the end of the town’s business district, a mix of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Victorian storefronts and 1960s-era highway development. The stylistic mishmash was comforting to Josh — it reminded him of the area where he’d grown up. A large Mobil sign lit the corner ahead. Josh walked to it, thinking he would find a cup of coffee there. But the station wasn’t open yet. He continued through the lot, trailed by his bodyguard, who for some reason didn’t seem inclined to get very close.

A light shone through the window of a cement block building across the street. Josh glanced both ways, then crossed toward it. The place turned out to be a bagel shop, and there were people inside — the baker and his helper, along with two customers who sat talking at a corner table as Josh came in. Coffee was served at a counter to the side. Josh helped himself to a cup, then went and got two bagels.

“I’ll get it,” said the Texan, coming into the shop.

“Thanks,” said Josh. He stood back and waited while the marshal poured himself a coffee. The two customers were talking about a high school football game, apparently played years before.

“Feel like walking some more?” asked Josh when the marshal finished paying.

He nodded.

Josh started to go out the door when the headline on the local newspaper caught his eye.

QUESTIONS RAISED ON

CHINA INVASION CLAIM

Invasion? It was a massacre, not just an invasion.

He nearly bumped into the marshal as he turned back to look at the paper. It was a tabloid, and the headline, in large bold type, ran over an unrelated photo of a local house fire. It referred to a story inside the paper.

Josh went back and bought the paper. He stood back from the counter, folding the paper over so he could read it.

Chinese officials immediately questioned whether the footage was authentic.

“All along, the Vietnamese have been very adept at manipulating public opinion,” said Xi Hing Lee, a Chinese representative to the UN. “They have posted things on YouTube that are clearly fake.”

“And I guess the missile on the bridge was made up, too?” said Josh aloud.

“Not here,” said the marshal, in a gruff, though barely audible voice.

Josh continued reading. The story basically called him a liar, reporting the Chinese claims that the talk of atrocities was propaganda initiated by the Vietnamese.

He folded the newspaper beneath his arm as calmly as he could, took a small sip of coffee, then left the shop. This time, the marshal stayed with him as he walked down the street.

“What the hell?” said Josh, turning toward him. “I mean, what the hell?”

“Ah. Never believe what you read in the papers.”

“How can they think I made it up? I gave them a video for crap’s sake.”

His bodyguard shrugged.

Josh shook his head. He was walking back in the direction of the hotel, but he was too mad to go back to his room — he needed to burn off some energy. He reversed course, steaming back past the bagel shop practically at flank speed.

“You can’t take shit like this personally, kid,” said the marshal finally. He was taller than Josh, but he seemed to be having trouble keeping up.

“You like being called a liar?” Josh asked.

“Well — ”

“Yeah. That’s exactly my point.”

12

Zeus saw in slow motion:

Christian punching the policeman, the policeman falling against his comrade, Christian launching another punch, this one catching the man full in the face and throwing him backward.

Bowled over by his comrade, the second policeman sprawled on the ground. Zeus’s first instinct was to reach down and help him up, but as he did, the man began pushing himself backward to get away.

“It’s all right,” said Zeus. “This is all a mistake. It’s just a mistake.”

The frightened policeman had a whistle attached to a ring on one of his fingers. He put his hand to his mouth and began to blow.

“Damn you!” yelled Christian.

Zeus grabbed him before he could kick the policeman. He pushed Christian back against the wall.

“This is just a big misunderstanding,” yelled Zeus, still thinking he could calm the situation.

But it had gone far beyond that — the other policeman reached to his holster for his gun.

“We gotta get out of here!” yelled Christian. He slipped from Zeus’s grasp and ran down the hall toward the door.

Zeus saw the officer pulling the gun out. He took two steps and kicked it away. Then he started running. Shouts and whistles echoed through the hall. The passengers in the room crowded around the door, gaping as Zeus passed.

Christian flew through the door to the outside. Zeus followed. There was no other choice; running was the only option now.

Eventually, though, he was going to kick Christian’s head in.

Zeus hit the door with his left shoulder, jolting it open. The two policemen who’d been outside were yelling at Christian to stop. The one on the right raised his pistol to fire. Zeus launched himself at the man. He hit him hard in the back, toppling him over. The gun fired, then flew from the cop’s hand as he hit the pavement. Zeus scrambled after it, scooping it up in his right hand before jumping to his feet.

Where the hell is Christian?

Zeus saw someone beyond the circle of light running behind the dark shadow of the nearby bus. He threw himself forward, tripping, but then regaining his balance. He pumped his legs. They felt as if they were thigh-deep in mud, each stride an effort. His heart pumped hard in his chest, the beats thick in his throat as he ran for the bus.

“Christian! For crap’s sake, where the hell are you!” he yelled. “Christian!”

There was no answer, or at least none that he could hear. But the second bus pulled out from around the first. Zeus veered toward it, still running at top speed. The bus lurched, then slowed, its door open.

Zeus heard a pair of gunshots just as he reached the vehicle. He grabbed the bar inside the door and pulled himself up, holding on as Christian stepped on the gas.

“What the hell are you doing?” Zeus yelled.

“Getting the hell out of here! You got any better ideas?”

They barreled down the apron area for a few hundred feet, lights off, then veered left as Christian ran out of pavement. The bus tipped hard on its wheels, squealing ferociously but remaining upright.

“Where are you going?” demanded Zeus.

“Out of here!”

“You’re heading for the runway.”

“Tell me something better.”

A white light cut across their path. The bus began to shake. The white turned black, then flashed red. A plane passed overhead so close Zeus thought it was going through them.

By the time Christian reacted the plane had already passed. He braked hard, then overcorrected as the bus veered left. They fishtailed back and forth. Zeus flew to the floor, arms curled around his head. He was sure they were going to roll over. But somehow the bus remained on all four wheels, weaving a little less wildly as Christian fought to find something approaching a straight line. By the time Zeus got to his feet, Christian had found a service road. There was a fence ahead; beyond it, an open field.

Christian headed straight for the fence.

“What!” yelled Zeus.

Christian didn’t answer.

“Stay on the road! Turn!” yelled Zeus.

Christian, eyes glazed, drove straight through the fence. The bus wheezed as it went down a short hill. Shaking and groaning, its front wheels sunk into the loose dirt as it hit the field, but the vehicle had enough momentum to keep going, plowing through a shallow irrigation ditch and then continuing into a field.

In better days there would have been wheat or soybeans here, but the land was dry and hard-packed by the lack of rain over the past two years. The bus plowed on, hurling dust in a whirlwind around them. They continued across for a good three or four hundred feet, until they drove into a second ditch. This one was deep enough for the front bumper of the bus to strike the embankment as it came to the bottom. The bumper ground into the earth like a spear and the back of the bus flew to the right. For a moment it seemed to Zeus that he was flying. Time stopped in midair, everything frozen. All of his thoughts were frozen before him, snippets and shards of ideas and sensations: the war, the U.S., his prize Corvette, Solt Jan — they were all there around him, like playing cards spread out on a table.

Then time went fast again. The bus crashed onto its side with a thud. Zeus sprawled against the glass, bashing his face as he fell. His knee hit the top of a seatback as he fell, and he felt his kneecap pop. He rolled through the bus, arms flailing as he tried to grab a handhold.

Zeus lost his breath, his side collapsing from a sharp blow against the side of something in the bus. He fell on his back, trying to will his diaphragm and lungs to work again. He squeezed and squeezed until realizing that was exactly the wrong thing to do. He relaxed and his breath came back.

His vision widened from the black dot it had fled to. He saw the bus’s interior, dust filtering in a yellowish-red glow that came from the dash lights and the LEDs on the floor and ceiling.

Christian groaned behind him.

“We have to get the hell out of here,” said Zeus, getting to his knees. He rose and moved tentatively down the row of windows to one marked with red LEDs. He put his hands on the bottom, and pushed. His left wrist hurt; he wedged his elbow against the frame instead and popped out the emergency window.

“You comin’?” he yelled, climbing halfway out.

Christian groaned in response. Zeus looked around. The airport was straight ahead, quiet in the distance, at least for the moment.

There was a highway not fifty yards away, up a slight hill.

“Come on,” said Zeus, ducking back into the bus. “There’s a road.”

Christian groaned on his right, near the back of the bus.

“How the hell did you get back here?” Zeus said, crawling toward him. “Win, come on. We gotta get out of here. There’s a road.”

Christian raised his head and turned toward Zeus. He blinked his eyes.

It wasn’t Christian — it was the bus driver.

Shit, thought Zeus, backing away.

“Christian?”

“I’m here.” Christian rose from the stairwell near the driver’s seat. “What the hell?”

“Yeah, what the hell. That’s my feeling exactly.”

“Where are we?” muttered Christian.

“In deep shit, and headed deeper,” said Zeus. “Come on. We gotta get out before they find us.”

“Where?”

“There’s a road up there. We’ll find someplace to hide or something.”

Zeus waited by the open window as Christian clambered toward him.

“Here’s your gun,” said Christian, handing over the pistol. He’d found it on the way.

Zeus grabbed it. “You’re lucky I don’t shoot you with it.”

Zeus left the driver — there was nothing he could tell the authorities that they wouldn’t already know.

They crossed the highway, walking in the direction of lights about a mile farther north. Zeus had only the vaguest idea of where they were, and no real plan on what to do next. They had no equipment, no phones, no GPS, no secret decoder ring’s or Enterprise communicators that would beam them up to safety.

Beijing and the embassy was probably their best bet, but getting there would be next to impossible. They had their passports, but those would surely identify them as the criminals who had caused such havoc in Beihai. They had only American money, and not all that much of that. Neither Zeus nor Christian spoke Chinese, and from what he’d heard and had seen already, it was unlikely they’d find many people who spoke English, at least until they got to a large city.

“You think we can find a car or something at one of those houses?” asked Christian as they got closer to the lights.

“I dunno,” said Zeus.

“Can you hot-wire a car?”

Zeus could hot-wire a car, as a matter of fact, bypassing the key solenoid; it wasn’t that hard on most cars. At least not on the older cars that he had worked on and restored since he was thirteen. But could he do it to whatever little econobox rice-burner they found? And could he do it in the dark, without anyone seeing them?

Those were the more pertinent questions, and Zeus had no answer to them.

Stealing a car made sense, or would have, if there had been cars near any of the three houses and two farm buildings clustered around a fork in the road. The only vehicles they could find were bicycles, parked neatly against the side of the smallest of the three houses. Christian complained about his ankle, wondering if it would be up to pedaling.

“Suck it up,” said Zeus, whose entire body was covered with bruises and welts. He took one of the bikes and pushed it as quietly as possible from the house toward the road. Christian eventually followed.

They rode along the dirt road for a few miles, moving roughly north. After about fifteen minutes, Zeus spotted a long highway overpass ahead. The highway crossed over the local road, veering through the hills. He rode under and beyond it, vainly hoping there would be an access ramp. When he realized there wasn’t, he turned and went back to the stone and rubble embankment below the overpass. There he got off the bike and began hauling it up the hill toward the highway.

The bicycle was a heavy Chinese model, built to withstand the rugged roads of the Chinese countryside and small cities; it was not light. Christian groaned as he slipped sideways up the hill.

A truck whizzed by as Zeus reached the top. The highway was a two-lane national road, recently repaved. There was a wide shoulder next to the guardrail, and at the moment at least no other cars or trucks in sight. Zeus put his bike on the pavement and began pedaling.

“Are we allowed to ride on this?” said Christian, huffing as he caught up.

Zeus didn’t answer.

“Hey, are we going to get stopped?”

“Do I look like a traffic cop?” snapped Zeus.

“I’m just asking.”

Zeus concentrated on pedaling, pushing down his legs in long strokes. His kneecap was feeling odd. Not hurt, exactly; it was more like someone had taken it off and put it back on wrong.

After they had been riding for about ten minutes, they saw the glow of lights in the distance. Zeus lowered his head and began pedaling in earnest, pumping his legs and ignoring as much as possible the stitch developing in his side. He focused only on the pavement immediately in front of him. The world narrowed to the rush of wind around his head. Finally, the pain at his side was too much. He eased his pace and looked up, gazing into the distance at his goal.

It wasn’t a city as he had thought. It was a pulloff, a truck stop, similar to those in the States. A small, well-lit building sat on a slight rise to the right in front of a sea of cement. Brightly colored fuel pumps stood like buoys near the building.

Four semitrailers and six large, open, and canvas-covered trucks were idling at the side of the road.

Opportunity knocks, Zeus thought.

Zeus rode along the side of the road until just short of the rest stop. Gliding to a stop, he picked up the bike and dropped it over the rail into the scraggly grass on the other side of the shoulder. He glanced back and saw Christian, puffing with exertion, some thirty yards away.

There was no reason to wait. Half-crouching, half-trotting, Zeus went to the last truck in the line. He climbed up on the running board, and put his hand to the door. It was locked. And not only that: the driver was dozing behind the wheel.

Zeus dropped quickly to the ground, bumping into Christian and knocking him to the pavement.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Sssshhh.”

Zeus checked each of the trucks. The drivers were sleeping in all of them. Dejected, Zeus trotted went back to his bike.

“My leg is killing me,” said Christian, trailing him. “I think my ankle’s going to fall off.”

“You’ll live.”

“No, look at it.” He held his right leg up. Even in the dim light Zeus could tell the ankle was swollen. “I don’t know how much farther I can go.”

“Damn.”

“I know. It sucks.”

More than you’ll admit, Zeus thought, considering this mess is all your fault. But he kept his mouth shut; the last thing they needed now was another outburst of insanity.

“We’ll hitch a ride on one of the trucks,” said Zeus.

“What about carjacking one?”

Zeus considered the possibility.

“I don’t know,” said Zeus. “If we keep the driver with us, he’ll be a problem. If we kick him out, he’ll be sure to call the police.”

“Just shoot him.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“Fuck him. This is a war.”

“We’re not at war, Win.”

“Like hell we’re not! We just blew up some of their landing ships. And a patrol boat.”

“He’s a civilian.”

“Crap. What do you want to do? We can’t just walk to Beijing. Why don’t we just turn ourselves in and let them shoot us as spies?”

“You’re the one that screwed this all up,” answered Zeus. He began to seethe. “You snapped. You’re an asshole.”

“Don’t call me an asshole.”

“You are. You’ve always been an asshole. At school. At the com — ”

Zeus stopped midsentence, ducking back as Christian threw a haymaker in his direction. Failing to connect, Christian crumbled as his ankle gave way under the weight of his swing.

“Asshole,” said Zeus. “Proves my point.”

Christian began pounding the ground. Zeus, disgusted, shook his head. Then he realized his companion was crying.

“I am an asshole,” Christian sobbed. “I screwed everything up. I’m a wimp. I’m no good. I’m useless.”

All true, thought Zeus. But this was one hell of a time for such a revelation.

He squeezed his fingers against the corner of his temple. They were coming apart — Christian obviously, but he was, too. He already had. The fatigue of the last few days, the stress of the mission, and then the danger behind the lines: they’d reached their breaking point.

God, was it this easy to crack?

Zeus had heard dozens of lectures about battle stress and fatigue and posttraumatic stress, but in every story, the flash point had come after real duress: guys being shelled for hours on end, or marching through jungles for days, getting bombed by their own planes.

What the hell had he been through? One mission.

Actually, several. And getting to Hainan Island had been an ordeal in and of itself. But still, it shouldn’t have been enough to break him.

It wasn’t. He was a goddamn, well-trained soldier, for Christ’s sake — a freakin’ major.; a MAY-JOR, not some skinny pimple-faced skateboarder tossed into his first firefight without a weapon or a radio.

Goddamn.

“Pull yourself together,” he said, addressing himself as much as Christian. “We gotta get our butts out of here.”

Christian didn’t answer. But his back stopped heaving, and he slowly rose from the ground.

“We’ll hide in one of the trucks, and go as far as he takes us,” Zeus said. “Come on.”

He walked back to the line of trucks. He decided it would be better to hide in one of the smaller vehicles, since they wouldn’t have to worry about opening the rear door. But the cargo area of the first truck was jammed tight with canisters that appeared from the colors to be acetylene and oxygen, and there was no room except on the top of them. The second was only half full: some furniture and boxes were secured in the front, leaving a good space on the bed. The truck was a flatbed with sides made of wooden staves, covered by a canvas tarp. Lying on his belly, Zeus could see off the sides as well as the rear, while from the distance he figured he would look like one of the furled rugs poking between the cab and the boxes.

“Say nothing,” he whispered to Christian as he slid into the back.

Christian, head hanging down, complied.

A week before, Zeus would have enjoyed seeing Win Christian crumble. The truth was, he hated the son of a bitch with a passion. He’d been an obnoxious, holier-than-thou type at West Point, and had gotten worse as time went on. Most recently, he had been Zeus’s main antagonist at the Red Dragon computerized war simulations, cocky and full of himself before the simulations, brimming with unjustified overconfidence. Cutting him down in the sims — Zeus had won every confrontation — had been the highlight of his posting.

But now Zeus only felt disgust at himself, not Christian. Because, if the truth be told, he suddenly felt just as weak. He should have stopped Christian from going nuts back at the airport. That was his responsibility, wasn’t it? He’d known Christian was getting edgy. He could make excuses, explanations — he was damned tired himself — but what did they matter? They were where they were because he hadn’t done anything to fix it.

Kill a civilian?

That was murder, pure and simple. Even if they were at war, it was wrong. Wrong. He had been trained, taught, better than that.

Much better. Zeus had served as a captain in Special Forces. He’d seen combat, real combat; not as much as a lot of other guys, including most of the men he’d led, but enough to have been tested and survived. And now he was falling apart without anyone even firing at him.

The truck rocked on its springs. Zeus turned back to Christian, ready to punch him for moving. Then he realized it was the driver in the cab. He’d woken up.

Zeus put up his finger and held it to his lips. Christian nodded.

They waited for a minute or two, lying silently on the bed of the truck. Finally, Zeus realized that the man had gone back to sleep. He curled back and put his face close to Christian’s ear.

“We have to just be patient,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“We’ll get out of this.”

One of the tractor-trailers ahead of them rumbled to life. The motor was loud, and the vibrations from the tailpipe so strong that the bottom of their truck rattled.

Zeus squirreled himself around, trying to make himself more comfortable. He also took the gun from his belt, keeping it ready in his hand.

He didn’t want to kill civilians. But if it came down to it, if it was him or them, what would he do?

He’d always thought kill-or-be-killed was an easy question. But now he wasn’t sure. Was survival more important, or surviving as a moral man?

If you believed in eternity, if you believed in God and heaven, then surely being a moral man was more important.

But hell, he was Catholic. He could always confess his sins.

The irreverence struck him as funny, and it was all he could do to keep himself from laughing.

There was more shifting in the cab. The truck started. Its muffler was shot, and the whole vehicle vibrated with the engine’s loud, uneven rumble.

The truck backed up slightly, then eased out onto the highway.

Zeus tried to quiet his mind. The jumbled emotions were due mostly to fatigue. He could get out of this — he would get out of this. All he had to do was keep his head.

They had driven for about twenty minutes when the truck began to slow down, then pulled off to the side. Zeus pushed himself tight against the boxes, holding his breath. He felt the gun in his hand.

Zeus caught a glimpse of the driver as he got out and went around the back of the truck, continuing into the nearby field. He was taking a leak.

Now’s our chance.

Zeus slipped quietly along the truck bed, and climbed down. Glancing back, he saw Christian’s eyes open, watching him. He motioned with his hands: Stay there. Quiet. Then he ran around to the front of the truck.

Zeus still had the gun in his right hand. He took it in his left, then quietly opened the driver’s side door. But as he started to climb up into the cab, he saw that the keys weren’t in the ignition.

Cursing to himself, he slipped down and gently closed the cab door. He took a deep breath, then another.

Come on, he told himself. Get to it.

Zeus slipped along the front of the truck, hiding behind the hood. He couldn’t see the driver. It made more sense to wait for him to come back, but Zeus’s adrenaline was rising. The urge to go and grab him was irresistible. He started to rise — and was startled to see the driver just turning the corner of the truck, not three feet away.

Zeus threw himself forward, striking the man awkwardly with his left fist. Had the driver been less surprised than Zeus, or perhaps a larger man, he would have been able to easily parry the blow; it was delivered off-balance, and Zeus was wide open for an easy counterpunch. But the last thing the man expected was to be confronted by a thief, and his eyes widened as Zeus’s blow landed. Zeus swung the pistol toward his head, catching him at the side of the temple. The man collapsed on the pavement, his eyes shut.

Zeus dropped to his knees, anxious. The man was still breathing, but he was unconscious.

The keys were on a long chain at his belt. Zeus unhooked them, then dragged the man off the side of the road.

“What are you going to do with him?” Christian asked, limping around from the back.

“Just get in the truck,” said Zeus.

“You gonna kill him?”

“Get in the truck.”

Christian blinked, then did as he was told.

Zeus dragged the man about twenty yards from the road. He bent down, making sure one last time that he was still breathing, then ran back to the cab.

There was a large map among the papers in the cab’s glove compartment. Between the map and the large compass on the dashboard, they figured out that they were headed toward National Road 325, headed for Qinzhou.

The map could get them all the way to Beijing, but they’d need to stop for fuel several times; they had barely a half a tank. Zeus unfolded the map and held it over the steering wheel, thinking how he might get fuel without only American money. Fifty dollars might very well cover a full tank — he had no idea what the price would be, let alone whether a station out here would even accept American money.

Surely not.

Robbing a place would be even more foolish.

Christian sat pitched into the corner of the cab, quiet, sullen. Zeus thought he should say something to him, give him some sort of morale booster, but he didn’t feel like talking to him, much less cheering him up, so they drove in silence.

As best he could figure, they were on G050, the expressway heading westward. Qinzhou would be off to the right, to the northeast. They were so far from Beijing that it wasn’t even on the map. Zeus pulled the map away from the wheel, folding it before handing it to Christian. The major took it wordlessly, holding it in his hand as if it were a train ticket waiting to be collected.

The highway was not very much different than those in the States. There were few other vehicles; most were trucks, and the majority were going the other way. Every time Zeus saw a set of lights growing in his side mirror, he eased off the gas, hoping to let them slip by him with a minimum of fuss. As they approached, he felt a quick pinch of fear. He worried that the vehicle would turn out to be a police car.

None did. As each passed, he felt a small burst of relief, enough to cheer him and push him on for a few miles, until more headlights appeared. This rollercoaster of emotions made it harder for Zeus to concentrate on a plan, and it was not until he saw the glow of Qinzhou to the north that he finally formulated one.

“Give me that map again,” Zeus told Christian.

Once again he spread it along the top of the steering wheel. Rather than going all the way to Beijing, the best thing to do was to turn south. Vietnam was relatively close — the border was perhaps fifty miles away. True, there would be troops and border guards, but the fighting was much farther west, and in the jungle it should be relatively easy to find a place to slip through.

Even better: they could steal a boat from the coast and sail south. He already knew from the briefing for the mission that the Chinese weren’t able to patrol the entire coastline, and were concentrating their ships to the east and south. A few hours in a small fishing vessel would be far less risky than trying to drive to Beijing.

“Take this,” he told Christian, handing him the map. “We want to stay on G050 to S221. Can you follow it?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t guess.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know the road system. It looks like it’ll be a lesser road. Like a state highway compared to an interstate. Something like that.”

“Mmmmm,” said Christian, studying the map.

Though the map included Western letters and numbers for the highways, the road signs they passed were exclusively in Chinese. Christian worked on correlating the Chinese highway designations with the Western figures, and found the turnoff for S221, which cut south. But as soon as they pulled around the access ramp off the expressway, Zeus realized they had another problem. There was a toll booth ahead.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Do we have money?”

“What?” said Christian.

“Tolls. Look around — maybe there’s change in the glove compartment.”

Christian opened it and rifled through even though they’d already looked.

Zeus wasn’t sure what to do. There was a small, thin gate barring the lane; he could roll through easily enough. But surely the toll collector would alert the local police. They’d be pulled over in minutes.

He could play dumb foreigner. But why would a dumb foreigner be driving a truck?

He eased into the toll lane, deciding he would hit the gas just as he drew even with the booth. That would take the collector by surprise, and he might not get out quickly enough to see the truck’s plate.

A bare hope, but all he had.

“Money!” said Christian. He’d found a small change purse between the seats. “How much?”

Zeus tapped the brake, jerking the truck to a stop just even with the window of the booth. A woman who barely came up to the handle on the truck’s door peered up quizzically.

“Give me the biggest bill,” Zeus whispered to Christian.

Christian handed him a twenty yuan note. Zeus leaned his hand down to the toll taker, hoping that she wouldn’t get a good glimpse of his face and realize he was Caucasian.

The woman began jabbering at him. He guessed she was asking if he had something smaller, since she hadn’t taken the bill.

He shrugged, holding his hand out in an empty gesture.

“We should just go,” said Christian under his breath.

The gate was down. He could break through it easily enough, but that would mean they’d have to ditch the truck.

Zeus glanced to his right, looking to make sure there wasn’t a police car on the shoulder ahead. He was about to stomp on the gas when Christian tapped him across the chest.

He held out a toll card.

Zeus took it and handed it down. The tollkeeper said something in an exasperated tone, probably accusing him of being a dope. She kept talking, asking for something else. Maybe his license — were foreigners allowed to drive in China?

It didn’t matter. He didn’t have a Chinese license — or any license. And he certainly wasn’t going to give her his passport.

The woman scolded him. Zeus realized finally that she wanted more money.

“Give me another bill,” he told Christian, turning to him.

“What?”

“Just give me some more money.”

“There are two tens.”

Christian gave them to him. Zeus held them down. The woman took them.

The gate remained down.

All right, thought Zeus. That’s it. He put his foot on the gas. But instead of revving, the engine stalled, flooded by the sudden surge of fuel.

His throat tightened in an instant.

Quickly, he reached for the key. Nothing happened. He slipped the truck into neutral. Before he could try again, the tollkeeper banged on the door. He glanced in the mirror, saw her holding her hand up.

Change.

He reached down, took it, and with his hand shaking, restarted the truck. The gate was open; he eased through.

“Here,” he told Christian, handing him the money.

They drove in silence for another fifteen minutes. Zeus’s eyelids started to droop. Despite the anxiety and adrenaline, he teetered on the edge of sleep. Sleep was what he really needed — sleep would erase much of the fear; sleep would restore his strength; sleep would help him think clearly. If he slept, he could sort everything out. He could figure out how to get back to Vietnam.

He could decide what he felt about killing civilians.

He knew how he felt about that: he should not kill civilians. He could not. Even if he were at war, it would not be right.

If they tried to kill him?

Then they weren’t civilians.

What if they didn’t try to kill him themselves, but told other people who would try to kill him? What if they were going to do that, but hadn’t yet?

Where was the line?

“Hey — you failin’ asleep?” asked Christian.

Zeus shook himself back to full consciousness.

“I’m okay,” he said.

“You got a plan?”

“We go south. We get close to the water. We get a boat.”

“Right.”

“So you gotta get us close to the water. But not a big town. A small one.”

“If we’re gonna steal a boat we gotta do it soon,” said Christian. “It’ll be light maybe in an hour. Less.”

“Yeah.”

“I’d like to sleep,” added Christian.

“So would I,” admitted Zeus. “But we can’t.”

Christian checked the map. They were driving in the direction of Fangchenggang, a large port city. Would they have an easier time getting a boat there, or just outside it?

Outside, Zeus thought.

“We have to find a good road to take us around the city, into the suburbs but near the water,” he told Christian. “It would be better south — the closer we are to Vietnam, the better.”

Christian studied the map.

Zeus spotted a truck off the side of the road ahead. He slowed, saw it was two trucks. Then he realized both were army trucks.

“We’re getting the hell off this road right away,” he told Christian. He spotted a turnoff ahead. “Figure out where we are.”

13

Cho Lai shook his head as his interior minister continued speaking. There had been more food riots overnight in Harbin. Meanwhile, the governor of Guangdong Province had sent police to “guard” a number of factories owned by party officials — a move meant as a threat to get more aid from the central government.

“All of this disruption when the country is at war,” said Cho Lai finally. “It is treason.”

The minister bowed his head.

“Criminals will be dealt with harshly,” continued the premier. “Remind them of that. And note, too, that we will not be blackmailed.”

“Yes, Premier.”

“You’re dismissed.

Cho Lai struggled to maintain his calm. On the one hand, he realized his people needed food — the shortages were severe, even here in Beijing: he had seen them himself on unannounced tours of the markets. On the other hand, he was solving the country’s problems. All he needed was time.

The premier rose and walked around his large office, working off some of his frustration. Things in Vietnam were not going as planned. His generals were like frightened children, afraid to take even the smallest of losses.

And despite everything, they remained petrified of the Americans. The Americans, who were hiding in the shadows.

Why be afraid of them? China had succeeded in blocking any vote in the UN. Cho Lai was confident that there would be no vote of condemnation from the American Congress, either. He had spent enough money on lobbyists there to feed Harbin Province for a month — if only there were food to buy.

Still, one American remained beyond his reach: the President. He was a clever enemy, the dragon of many forms.

Why should Greene of all people help the Vietnamese? It was absurd and unfair. They had been Greene’s tormentors.

Admittedly, this had been an error of Cho Lai. He had thought the President would secretly endorse the punishment of Vietnam. He had even fantasized about calling him and sharing a few boasts. In his imagination, his foolish imagination, Cho Lai had thought Greene would welcome the country’s humiliation.

The intercom buzzed. Lo Gong, the defense minister, was waiting outside.

Cho Lai ordered him in.

“We are proceeding with a new plan to take Hai Phong,” Lo Gong said. “We will move down the coast with our tanks. And then, a stealth attack — we have ships that are prepared to enter the port.”

“Excellent,” said Cho Lai.

“The storm is the only difficulty.”

“What storm?”

“The typhoon, Your Excellency.”

“Damn the weather! Move ahead. Always timid! Is every general in my army a coward?”

The minister’s face reddened.

“Out!” thundered Cho Lai. “Out, before I lose my patience.”

The defense minister left without saying another word.

14

There was still another hour before dawn, but the city was already stirring, with a stream of trucks headed both toward and away from the harbor area. Traffic had already congealed on the major roads. Even the small byroads Zeus threaded through had a fair amount of vehicles.

Clusters of PLA trucks and soldiers were parked along the sides of several roads. Their mission, if any, seemed to be one of reassurance rather than actual security. In any event, they weren’t stopping civilian vehicles.

“There’s a line ahead,” said Christian. “More traffic.”

“Any way around it?”

“Not that I can see. Nothing on the map, either.”

Zeus drew to a stop behind a late model Buick. The GM car was a status symbol here, a sign of wealth and probably political influence, which went hand in hand.

“There are some lights about a half mile ahead,” said Christian, leaning out of the cab to look. “Must be a checkpoint.”

“You see a place I can turn around?”

“Nothing.”

Pulling a U-turn at this point would undoubtedly draw a lot of attention. He could do it anyway, find a side street, turn off.

“Look for a store with a parking lot,” he told Christian. “We’ll pull in there and leave the truck.”

“Yeah.”

A better solution presented itself as he crept ahead: a gas station sat ahead on the left. He’d have to cross traffic to get there. But it would be perfect.

Zeus waited for the Buick to move up a little farther, then began angling the truck in the direction of the service station. There was a stream of cars coming from the other direction, spaced just far enough apart to make it dangerous to cross.

Finally, he saw his chance. The truck bucked, nearly stalling as he gave it too much gas. This time he was able to back his foot off the pedal in time to keep the engine working, and they made it across into the service station without stalling or getting hit.

As they pulled alongside a pump an attendant came out of the nearby building.

“We’re outta here now,” Zeus told Christian, turning off the engine.

The attendant looked at him quizzically as Zeus jumped from the truck.

“Fill ‘er up,” said Zeus.

He tossed the man the keys, hitting him in the chest. With a quick stride, he walked around the back of the truck. Christian was already out.

“The ocean’s in that direction,” he told Zeus.

“Let’s go.”

It took them nearly two hours to get close to the water, walking down narrow streets that curled through mini-hamlets before opening into wet fields of salt marsh and muck. The area was crisscrossed by canals and bridges. Not many years before, rice fields had dotted the land, which had been partially reclaimed from the ocean centuries ago. But effluence from the nearby city and factories had poisoned the shallow bay waters. The ocean was rising gently, flooding into the muck, but it couldn’t come fast enough to cleanse the ground.

Adding insult to injury, much of the land was now being filled in, legally and illegally, with garbage from the industrial north. Zeus and Christian wended their way past several massive dumping grounds. One was a mountain of old computers and other electronic gear. A trio of squatters huts sat at the edge of the dump near the road, as if standing guard. An old woman and two children watched them as they walked past, no doubt wondering what they were up to.

The sea smelled worse with every step closer. A thick, oily stench hung in the air, stinging their eyes.

“End of the road,” said Christian, pointing toward the rocks ahead. “God, the smell is wretched.”

Zeus remained silent as he walked toward the water. He was calmer than he had been before, but even more tired. His stomach felt like a marble rock, smooth and hard. His mouth was dry, his neck ached.

The sun, low on the horizon, pinched his eyes when he looked back at it. They’d come out on the western side of a peninsula opposite the city proper, which lay two or three miles across a shallow bay. Zeus stood at the water’s edge, gazing across at the buildings in the distance. A jungle of red seaweed and algae floated nearby, giving the water a purplish cast. Barges were lined up to the right, a vast array bereft of cargo.

A navy vessel was anchored in the open water to his left, too far to be identified even if Zeus had been an expert on the Chinese navy. From here it looked rather large and ominous.

“Now what do we do?” asked Christian.

“We find a boat,” said Zeus. “There should be plenty of fishing boats around somewhere.”

“Let’s try this way,” he said, starting back. “We’ll work our way along the coast and see if we see anything.”

“I really need to rest.”

“Soon.”

About a half hour later, after zigging and zagging across a few marshy dunes and hills of grass that came nearly to their chests, Zeus spotted a pair of boats anchored together about twenty yards from land. They rocked gently with the light breeze.

There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Zeus sat down in muddy sand, and took off his shoes.

“We’re swimming?” Christian asked.

“Unless you got a better idea.”

The oily film on the water made Zeus decide he’d keep his pants and shirt on. He put his shoes on a rock, thinking he’d come back for them, then he put the gun there, too.

The mud and weeds were soft, like a carpet thrown beneath the water. The first few yards were almost flat; the angle was very gradual after that.

Zeus got within arm’s length of the nearest boat when the depth suddenly dropped off. He reached out with his arm and grabbed the side of the boat, kicking his feet free of the muck.

Long and narrow, the wooden-hulled craft looked more like a racing shell than a fisherman’s boat. It was propelled by two long oars, one at the bow and one at the stern. A tiny, open-sided canvas tent sat just aft of the midway point, its stretched fabric bleached and brittle from the sun.

“Front or back?” said Christian, working through the water behind him.

“You take the bow.”

Zeus pulled the long oar from the bottom of the boat and positioned it in the yoke.

The boat was tied to a stick that poked out of the water on the starboard side. Christian unleashed it, then moved up to the bow.

“We’ll go back for our shoes,” Zeus told him. “We may need them.”

In water this shallow, the oars were better used as poles, and they were much easier to manipulate standing up. But it took Zeus several minutes to realize that, and several more to master the technique well enough to get them close to the shore. Finally Christian jumped off, waded through the muck, and came back with the shoes and gun.

“Who do you think owns the boat?” he asked as he plunked Zeus’s shoes down.

“Somebody.”

“Maybe we should leave some money in the other boat.”

It wasn’t a bad idea, but Zeus ended up vetoing it. They might still need Chinese money they had — eighteen yuan from the trucker’s envelope. And leaving the American money might give anyone looking for them too much of a clue.

They headed toward the city’s shore, trying to skirt the Chinese warship by the widest margin possible. The wind began picking up when they were roughly halfway across; Zeus found it harder and harder to steer them in a straight line. By the time they got across they had been pushed back almost to the barges.

“We’re beat,” said Christian. “We really need sleep.”

“We gotta keep going,” insisted Zeus.

He tugged harder on the oar, angry with Christian even though he was only stating the obvious. They started doing better, then caught a break as the wind died.

“Look for a motorboat,” Zeus told Christian. “We’ll trade.”

“Yeah, anybody would take that deal.”

Zeus laughed. It was the first time he’d laughed in quite a while. It surprised him.

It felt good, shaking his lungs and clearing his head. They made it past the city peninsula, then began crossing a wide expanse of water toward an area of beaches. In happier times — only two years earlier — the beaches were popular with regional tourists. Now they were abandoned, flooded about halfway up, and cluttered with debris and seaweed.

No motorboats.

They kept going. The sun was high enough now to hit Zeus in the corner of his eye, the sharp edge of a nail in the flesh between socket and lid. He squinted against it, angling his head away as much as he could while still keeping his gaze on the direction he wanted to go.

Except for the glare, the sun was welcome. It felt warm rather than hot. The day turned pleasant, with just enough breeze to scatter the flies and mosquitoes.

An idyllic day, except for where they were.

Zeus saw that Christian wasn’t paddling anymore.

“Christian?” said Zeus. “Christian?”

He slid his oar against the side of the boat. He should go check on his companion.

Later…

With both men asleep, the boat drifted toward shore. Pushed by the current, it ran aground in a twisted maze of debris and muck on one of the small islands southeast of port. Zeus slept on, oblivious to everything around him- the seabirds, the stench, the two large but half-empty grain carriers passing up the channel a few miles away. The water lapping against the side of the boat entered his dreams as a gentle sound, its monotonous beat reassuring and adding to his ease.

But eventually his dreams took strange shapes, past mixing with present. He was back in the plane when the attack on the dam began. The flight morphed into part of the war simulation as they looked at the shape war in Asia would take. He was driving the truck. He was shooting the guard in the airport.

He hadn’t shot the guard in real life. But he was powerless to prevent it from happening in the dream.

In the dream, he shot the man who came for them in the hallway, then stood over him, pistol pointing at his forehead, daring him to move, even though the man was already dead. Blood began to spurt from the dead man’s right eye, then his left. It started to pour from his nose and his mouth and his ears.

The hallway filled with blood. It flooded, rising to his knees, his stomach, his elbow. Zeus’s hand was wet with it.

Then finally he woke up.

He was hanging half out of the boat, his arm deep in the murky water. He pushed himself upright, nearly losing his balance and flipping the craft over.

Or so it seemed.

Christian was huddled in the front. A rasping noise came from his chest. He was snoring.

Zeus stretched his back muscles, turning left and right slowly, his joints cracking. Perhaps they’d be better off staying here until nightfall. They’d have more strength.

On the other hand, a moving fishing boat was a lot less conspicuous than one hung up in the weeds.

By his reckoning, the border with Vietnam was no more than forty miles away.

Zeus crawled forward in the boat to wake Christian. But when he reached him he decided to let him rest. Better that one of them would have full strength, or as much as a few fitful hours of sleep would get him.

He went back and took the oar, pushing the boat backward out of the weeds. For a moment, he lost his balance and the boat tipped hard to the side. Zeus just barely managed to stay upright. He knelt for a moment, hunkered over to catch his breath. Then he rose and began to make his way.

The current flowed gently southward, which made it much easier to paddle. Zeus concentrated on making perfect strokes — long, powerful, with a subtle movement at the very end to correct his course. Inevitably, he tired of this, finding perfection unachievable. He began to concentrate instead on everything around him: the open water to his left; the succession of ragged, battered beaches and flooded swamps on his right.

Farther inland, up in the inlets and on the other side of man-made dykes, were pens for fish farms. Given the horrible smell and the waste that he saw along the shoreline, he wondered what sort of poisons the fish would contain.

The sun was nearing the horizon on his left when he spotted a Chinese naval vessel about a mile south. This one was much closer to shore than the one they’d skirted early in the day. It was smaller, with machine guns fore and aft.

It was infinitely more dangerous than the other one, Zeus realized; this was the sort of craft that would take an interest in him. Its guns could easily chew through the wood of his purloined boat.

Zeus decided he would slip toward shore and wait a few hours until sunset. It would be easier to get by then, and in any event, he could use a rest.

But as he edged the oar forward to act as a rudder, he saw the bow of the patrol boat tuck down, as if swallowed by a sudden wave. The flag on the mast shot to the left. The boat was turning. They’d already spotted them.

15

The past few presidents had gotten away from using the Oval Office as an actual working office, preferring the nearby study and even space upstairs in the residence, part of a trend toward demystifying and relaxing the presidency. But Greene liked the Oval Office for precisely the reason the others didn’t — he wanted the gravitas of the place to impress everyone on how important their work was.

And to emphasize the fact that he, George Chester Greene, was the president.

Not that it was working all that well this morning. Not that it ever worked all that well with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Matthews.

Matthews was enumerating, for perhaps the hundredth time since the crisis with China began, the dangers inherent in bringing a full carrier group into the Gulf of Tonkin.

The Army chief of staff, Renata Gold, shifted in her seat. The Army general — the first woman to hold the post — had been in favor of intervention early on, but lately had come under so much criticism that she seemed now cautiously opposed.

Caution being the watchword of the day.

“You’ve made your point about the aircraft carriers,” Walter Jackson, the National Security director, told Matthews. “But let’s cut to the quick: could they defeat the Chinese naval forces?”

“Absolutely,” said the admiral.

Jackson glanced toward Greene. The NSC head had a triumphant smile on his face.

“Good,” said Greene, reaching for his coffee.

“But that’s not an argument to intervene,” added Matthews hastily.

“Noted,” said Greene. “Now, about General Harland Perry’s plan. Two divisions — ”

“Impossible,” said Matthews sharply. “We can’t commit ground troops. Congress won’t back intervention.”

“If I might continue, Admiral,” said Greene. “Perry has suggested two American divisions could win back the gains the Chinese have made in the west. But he also notes that’s unrealistic, and I concur.”

That was a sop to Matthews. All Greene got from him was a tight frown.

“The goal, as I see it, should be simply to contain the Chinese,” said Greene. “We bring the A-10As there to stop the Chinese armor. That would be a first step. Then, establish a no-fly zone over the peninsula. F-22s and F-35s.”

Greene glanced at Tommy Stills, the Air Force chief of staff and the one solidly hawkish member of the joint chiefs. He was nodding vigorously.

“The thing I need to be assured of,” added Greene, “is that this works. Is it doable? Do we stop the Chinese?”

“There can be no assurances,” said Matthews. “You’re asking for the impossible.”

“I think it has a reasonable chance,” said Stills.

Greene turned to Gold. “General?”

“Better than fifty-fifty,” she said.

“We can’t commit forces without congressional approval,” insisted Matthews. “Not on this scale.”

“I’ll worry about Congress,” said Greene.

There was a tap on the door. One of Greene’s schedule keepers was prompting him for his next appointment: breakfast with a group of senators currently opposed to his measure to aid Vietnam.

“I know everyone is on a tight schedule,” said Greene, rising. “Thank you for your input. I’ll keep you updated.”

The chiefs and their aides filed out. Greene was feeling optimistic about the meeting; it had gone better than he had imagined.

Until he spotted Walter Jackson’s frown.

“You think you have an agreement, don’t you?” said Jackson after the military people had gone.

“You heard them: they agreed Perry’s plan will work.”

“No, they said if it was politically feasible. If. You don’t have the votes in Congress. Matthews won’t stand by idly if you send the troops on your own authority. It’ll be leaked within an hour of your giving the order. Probably within the minute. The admiral’s probably setting up an anonymous Twitter account to take care of it right now.”

Greene looked over at his chief of staff, Dickson Theodore. Theodore had said nothing during the session. “Walter’s right. All the admiral’s talk about aircraft carriers? It’s code for keep us out of it.”

“The Air Force is gung-ho,” said Greene.

“The Air Force alone isn’t enough,” said Jackson. “And what do you think will happen the first time an airplane is shot down? It’ll be broadcast on the cable networks immediately.”

“Congress will have a fit,” added Theodore. “Troops — even airplanes — violate the neutrality act.”

“We’re not violating it,” said Greene. “We’re working around it. Allies are exempted. If we have a pending treaty with Vietnam, then by executive order they’re an ally.”

“You’re starting to sound like a lawyer,” said Theodore.

“That’s my degree over there,” said Greene.

“We can’t get Congress to approve intervention,” said Jackson. “We took our best shot with Josh MacArthur.”

“Maybe we should push for a vote,” said Theodore. “We do have the child. We could have her talk to the Senate.”

Theodore meant the Vietnamese refugee they had rescued, Ma.

“No. I’m not going to use her,” said Greene. “She’s just a kid. Besides, if Josh’s images don’t do it, nothing will. Senator Grasso’s hearing should swing some votes.”

Theodore’s eyes widened: Don’t count on too many.

“We can’t just let the Chinese roll over the country,” said Greene.

“We can keep working covertly,” said Jackson. “Until we can get public opinion on our side.”

“Covertly isn’t going win the war,” said Greene.

The Chinese might be stopped temporarily by judicious strikes and against-all-odds operations, but eventually their superior firepower would win the day.

Still, what were his other options?

None.

“We can at least ship them some weapons,” said Jackson.

“Granted,” said Greene.

That, too, was a problem — the neutrality act passed a year before forbade any outright sale or gift of weapons to any country in Asia, including allies.

“Has to be Russian weapons,” said Theodore. “Through another country.”

“Russia has been unwilling,” said Jackson. “The Vietnamese don’t have the money. And the Chinese are already giving them some good business. State has already made some backdoor inquiries.”

“They’re just not talking to the right people,” said Greene. He looked over at his appointment sheet for the next two days, then picked up his phone. “Marlene, that reception at the Polish embassy tomorrow night. Could you find out somehow if the Russian ambassador is expected to be there?”

“You’re not going to ask the Russian ambassador to supply the Vietnamese, are you?” asked Jackson when Greene hung up.

“No,” said Greene. “You are.”

16

“Christian! Christian! Wake the fuck up!”

Zeus pushed on the handle of the long oar, aiming the boat in the direction of the shore. There was no question that the patrol boat was coming in their direction — it seemed to have grown twice its size in just a few moments.

“Up, Win, up!”

Christian showed no sign of stirring. Zeus kept pushing with the oar, his muscles straining. Adrenaline flushed through his body. Everything went into the oar, every ounce of energy, every sensation. He could feel the ocean pushing back, trying to tackle him, but he wasn’t giving in — he was a quarterback in high school again, pushing through the line, squeezing for the last inch to make the touchdown.

The patrol boat’s bow was head-on in their direction. Any moment now, he expected the forward gun to fire.

Push, his body told him. Push!

“Win, get your ass up!” Zeus yelled. He pushed harder. The muck gave way as he paddled, dirt and seaweed parting then pushing back.

The vegetation was thick, but not enough to hide them. The thing to do was reach shore and run.

Run!

The word rumbled from his muscles, his legs twitching with it. Zeus pushed the oar until the boat hung up on a cluster of sand-encrusted rocks. Christian still hadn’t stirred in the bow. Zeus leapt forward into the water. He pushed the boat deeper into the weeds, then grabbed Christian’s shoulder. He didn’t try to rouse him; instead, he curled him over his back, hoisted him up, and staggered onto firm land.

“You are damn heavy,” he muttered.

He pumped his legs in the direction of a clump of low shrubs on his left. He ran past, chugging up a small incline to a larger cluster of trees.

Run!

Every muscle, every tendon and ligament in his body strained. But there was no question that he was reaching those trees. There was no question that he was moving away from the warship that was chasing them.

Zeus got about forty yards into the jungle before his legs gave way. Even then, it wasn’t a total collapse or surrender; it was more like a gradual winding down, his strides shortening, his back bending, until he practically crawled. He sank to his knees, then fell flat forward, pushed down by Christian’s weight.

Zeus lay on the ground for the length of one long, deep breath, then pushed up, rose, alert again, strength restored. He pushed Christian to the side and slipped back through the trees to the shore, looking out to sea.

He couldn’t see the warship. He looked down at the ground, took a long breath, then a second — it was as if his eyes needed to be reloaded.

Zeus raised his head. He spotted the patrol boat to his right, maybe a half mile off shore, no more.

He turned back and went to Christian.

“Up, Christian. You’re getting up now,” he said, prodding him with his foot. “I’m not carrying you any farther.”

“Uhhhh?”

“At least you’re not dead,” said Zeus. “Let’s go. Come on.”

“What the hell… what’s going on?”

“There’s a Chinese patrol boat. Come on — we must be really close to the border. We may even be over it. Come on.”

“Shit.”

Zeus took Christian’s arm and pulled him up.

“How did I get here?” asked Christian.

“I carried you, you bastard. Let’s go.”

Zeus tugged, then let go and began trotting farther inland. The jungle was thick; most likely the sailors wouldn’t follow too far inland.

It didn’t matter. They would outrun them. And if they didn’t outrun them, he would shoot them.

Zeus reached to his beltline. He’d forgotten the gun back in the boat.

You’ll kill them with your bare hands if you have to.

It was an idea, rather than a voice, something he felt rather than heard. Something he knew immediately was true.

He would kill them — he would succeed, there was no question of it, no doubt, only dead certainty.

The questions, the doubt he’d felt just a few hours before had disintegrated somewhere in the afternoon sun, dissolving into the steam rising from the shallow water above the sand amid the dank debris.

Something rumbled in the distance.

“What the hell?” said Christian, huffing behind him. “There’s not a cloud in the sky.”

“It’s gunfire, not thunder,” said Zeus tightly. “Don’t worry. They’re still pretty far away. Run. Run.”

They ran for almost a mile, weaving through the trees, gradually moving uphill. There was no sign that they were being followed, and in fact the single gunshot they’d heard was the only indication that there were any other humans in the world nearby. Still, Zeus kept running, his legs pushing onward. In a sense, his mind was no longer in control — his body was telling it what to db, or what would be done: They would run until their energy completely flagged, then they would rest for only a short minute, then they would begin again.

It was as if the rest of his body no longer entirely trusted his brain, as if the questions that had bothered it earlier had shown it to be unreliable, unfit for command in a military sense.

“Let’s go,” said Zeus, pushing through the thick weeds. “Come on.”

“I’m here,” grumbled Christian behind him.

“Faster,” said Zeus.

“Shit.”

Christian picked up his pace, pushing through the trees until he was only a few paces behind Zeus. The ground rose sharply ahead. Zeus took a breath, girding himself for the climb. Suddenly his foot slipped, and he found himself pirouetting to the side, falling into a small, narrow stream that ran in the crevice at the base of the hill. He landed flat on his back with a thud, his head smacking against a rock. He saw stars, or an approximation thereof; with a shout he twisted to his stomach and began up the hill, climbing first on his hands and knees, then pushing to his feet and trudging up. Christian grabbed the back of his shirt, pulling him to the summit of the hill. There they both collapsed, finally out of breath and energy.

“Are they still after us?” managed Christian after a few minutes of rest.

“Probably,” said Zeus.

“I just want to stay here.”

“Yeah,” admitted Zeus.

But they both got up.

They walked at a good pace across level ground. The trees were thicker and closer together than before. Every so often, Zeus turned to see if they were being followed. But he found he couldn’t look more than ten or twenty yards behind them.

He tried listening instead. But the jungle had too many noises for him to tell — birds in the distance, insects near and far, a frog somewhere.

“They can’t possibly follow us through all this,” said Christian after they’d been walking for about ten minutes. “Why would they bother?”

“Why would they fire at a fishing boat?” answered Zeus. “We’ll keep going for a while. It’s our best bet.”

“You really think we’re in Vietnam?”

“Maybe. More likely we’re still a few miles from the border.”

“How many’s a few?”

“I don’t know.”

Zeus took the map from his pocket. It was wet, either from the ocean or the stream. He unfolded it as he walked, then refolded it so he could hold and look at a small portion in one hand.

It was fine for roads, but trying to extrapolate the physical details of the coastline where they’d landed against the broad strokes of the map were next to impossible. They were definitely somewhere between Fangchenggang and the Vietnamese border, much closer to the border he thought than the city, but given the fact that they’d fallen asleep and drifted for hours, who really could tell?

“I’m hungry,” said Christian.

“Yeah, well, you see a McDonald’s, let me know.”

“Why are you such a jerk?”

“What?” Zeus stopped and turned around. Christian, a few feet away, glared at him but continued walking. “What do you mean, I’m a jerk?”

“You’re always busting on me.”

“You’re the jerk,” muttered Zeus, speeding his pace.

“I’m a jerk?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re just jealous.”

“Oh yeah, right.”

Neither man spoke for a few minutes. Zeus’s anger gradually dissipated. It made no sense to get mad at Christian, especially now. And it served no purpose: The guy had been a jerk for his whole life; a sudden conversion wasn’t likely.

“I mean it, Zeus.” Christian didn’t slow down. “You’re always riding me. You and your sidekick Rosen.”

“Steve wasn’t my sidekick.”

“Well I’m guessing he wasn’t your gay lover.”

“Ha-ha. Hill rises to the left,” said Zeus, pointing.

Zeus angled toward the hill. A narrow stream of water cascaded diagonally from above; he walked along it, crossing and recrossing to take advantage of the path. The vegetation thinned as they moved upward. Glancing back, Zeus realized that they had cut an easy-to-see path through the jungle as they brushed aside the thick vegetation; they would be easy to follow.

“We’re going to have to keep going,” he said. “Up along this creek and a lot farther, some place where we can’t be tracked. We left a pretty big trail through the brush back there.”

“You’re just figuring that out?” said Christian.

“Yeah, actually.”

“I’m surprised you admit it.”

The steeper the grade, the slower Zeus went, until finally he was moving in what seemed like baby steps. Christian was even slower, pausing every third or fourth step.

Zeus reached a clearing on the side of the hill. The ocean lay in glittery azure in the distance, sparkling with the setting of the sun.

Belatedly realizing he was in the open, he dropped to his knees. He could still see the water.

It was a breathtaking scene, barely a mile from the water. It was the stuff of postcards.

Or would have been, if not for the trio of warships three or four miles from shore.

There was no doubt that they were Chinese. They were big vessels, destroyers Zeus guessed, though he was not an expert.

He saw something else near them.

Probably a submarine on the surface, he thought, though from the distance it was hard to tell if it was even there.

“What?” huffed Christian, dragging himself over. He collapsed next to Zeus.

“You think the Chinese would keep their ships on their side of the border?” Zeus asked.

“I have no clue.”

“Do you remember from the G-2 estimates?”

“No.”

“I think they’d be near the border,” said Zeus.

“So?”

“Which means we’re near it. Maybe still in China, but near it.”

Zeus stared southward. He couldn’t see any ships in that direction. But the way the land curved and jutted, there could easily be something closer to shore there. Or farther out — his eyes were tired, and the sun, now starting to set behind him, threw both glare and shadows across the water.

“I think we should keep moving,” said Zeus. “Put more distance between us and the sailors, if they’re still following. Once it’s dark, we can rest for a little while, then get over the border. Or go farther, if we’re already over. Maybe we’ll run into some Vietnamese army patrols.”

He tried to force optimism into his voice. Christian didn’t answer, but rose before Zeus did. They walked for twenty minutes, moving along a rocky ridge, then down the path of another creek bed. About halfway down, Zeus decided to set a false path for anyone following. He had Christian stay where he was, then went through some brush, making sure to break several branches to make it obvious someone had gone through. He came to a clearing after about a hundred yards. This was an unexpected break: anyone tracking them would think they had gone clear through it. He backed out, retracing his steps to Christian.

“I think I heard some noise in that direction,” said Christian. He pointed southwest.

“What kind?”

Christian shrugged. “Trucks.”

Zeus got the map out. It didn’t show the border area in any detail.

“Let’s cut west,” he told Christian.

“Why?”

Zeus shrugged. He honestly had no answer.

About a half hour later, they came to a narrow, hard-packed dirt road that twisted in both directions north and south. Judging from the piles of gravel to the side, it had either recently been built or reconstructed.

“Doesn’t look as if it’s been used much,” said Zeus, staring at the surface. There were some tire tracks, but not the deep ruts that moving an army would leave.

“How much longer are we going to walk?” asked Christian.

“If we’re already in Vietnam, we should find a patrol soon.”

“If they don’t shoot us.”

Zeus started walking along the edge of the road. The Chinese had invaded in the western area of the country, aiming at sweeping south past Hanoi. The fact that they had been planning an amphibious assault suggested that they were going to cut off the northern portion of the country, avoiding the difficult Quàng Ninh highlands as well as the government’s center of power. They could then simply strangle what remained.

But even with their basic plan, they wouldn’t leave the frontier completely devoid of troops.

To Zeus, that meant they were already past the border. Otherwise they’d have seen more evidence of the Chinese army by now.

He walked on, following the road. It was getting dark now, hard to see. The shadows took on odd, threatening shapes.

Zeus tried warding off the boogies of his imagination by considering different strategies, things he would do if he were the Chinese. Where would he land in an amphibious attack? What would he do about Hai Phong, the port to the south? Would it be worth taking Hanoi at all, since clearly what the Chinese wanted was Vietnam’s rice and oil?

“There,” said Christian, suddenly rushing up to him and grabbing his arm. “Hear?”

“Huh?”

“Sssh. Listen.”

He could hear motor sounds, an engine. Not far away.

“Just for safety, let’s get off the road,” said Zeus.

“Which way?”

“Here.” Zeus crossed to the west. He slipped through the trees, his heart suddenly pounding hard — they were going home soon, finally, which meant that they’d be able to sleep, and get something to eat. He was starving.

Not home, exactly. Vietnam was far from home. But it would do.

After he’d gone far enough that he couldn’t see the road anymore, Zeus turned left and headed south. The brush was so thick that it cut at his shirt.

The noise had settled into a vague hum, a low buzz in the distance. Zeus wished he had gone farther along the road; they were farther away from the noise than he’d thought.

“What’s that?” said Christian, pointing to their right.

Zeus stared through the trees.

“The posts? You see it?”

Zeus didn’t at first. Finally he saw something a little greener than the rest.

“It’s a bridge. There’s another road there,” he said. “Bigger than what we were on.”

“Should we take it?” asked Christian. “It’ll be easier to walk.”

“Even more dangerous than the dirt road.”

“Yeah. Okay. You think you can find it on your map?”

Almost certainly not, thought Zeus, but he tried anyway, unfolding the map and staring at it for a while. It was too dark to see it without putting it right up to his eyes. And even that was futile. The roads over the Chinese border were just narrow red squiggles.

“I don’t know,” said Zeus finally. “Come on.”

They moved slowly toward the underbrush. The sound seemed to move away from them.

They stopped for a rest after a few minutes. Christian was wheezing.

“You all right?” Zeus asked.

“Let’s just keep going.”

A few minutes later, Zeus heard the sound of a truck approaching. Instinctively, he dropped to his knees and turned toward it. It was on the hard-paved road to the right.

It was moving slowly northward. A troop truck.

Maybe bringing dinner to pickets or sentries farther north. He could smell something, a fire, food.

Zeus took a half step toward it, thinking he would hail the driver, but then stopped. He had to be sure it was Vietnamese.

They waited until they couldn’t hear the truck anymore. Then they started again, walking southward steadily. Finally Zeus saw something through the leaves — a building, and wire. He stopped, crouching next to a tree, as much for support as cover.

“That’s either a Vietnamese,” he told Christian, “or a Chinese border post.”

“Well, which is it?”

“Which do you want?” Zeus sidled to his left, trying to get a better view.

“Whichever is closer to my bed.”

The complex ran in both directions. Zeus reasoned that the portion near the highway would be the most heavily guarded. It was also the place where the sentries would be most jumpy. So he started moving to his left, pushing quietly through the brush.

What if the Vietnamese heard him and thought he was an infiltrator, testing the line?

Zeus moved back, aiming to circle across to the dirt road. Christian gave him a perplexed look, then joined him silently.

Before they’d gone more than thirty yards, Zeus spotted a sandbagged position in the jungle. There was open ground all around it, a clearing that would make any intruder easy to spot.

The camp was about twenty-five or thirty yards beyond. He could see the roofs of several buildings, and the sides of a few tents.

There were two men behind the sandbags.

Vietnamese? Or Chinese?

Impossible to tell.

“Let’s circle around the other side and see if we can get a look at their uniforms,” said Zeus.

They retreated, carefully treading their way through the vegetation.

Zeus held his breath as they came back around. A floodlight had turned on behind the sandbagged post, throwing long shadows toward them.

They must be beyond the line, Zeus reasoned.

He was feeling good about this, finally very positive. The long ordeal was finally over.

All right, he told himself. Almost home.

“What’s the Vietnamese word for hello?” Zeus asked Christian as he crawled next to a tree.

Christian grabbed his shirt. “You’re not going to need it. Those guys are Chinese. Look at the guns in the shadows. They’re bullpups, not AKs.”

17

Mara woke up feeling stiff but relaxed. If not completely restored to her old self, she had more energy than she’d had in days. She took a long shower — the water pressure was surprisingly good — then had a cup of the surprisingly not-bad complimentary coffee in the room. Dressed, she went out into the hall and found that the marshal service bodyguard they’d been assigned was gone from his post.

That must mean Josh was gone as well. She knocked on his door just in case; when there was no answer, she went downstairs and asked the clerk at the desk where the best place was for breakfast. He directed her to a small shop around a side street in the middle of town, a five-minute walk.

They were sitting in the far corner. The marshal’s plate was scrubbed clean except for some egg stains and a few crumbs from his toast; Josh’s looked as if he had hardly touched his.

“How’d you sleep?” she asked him, pulling out a chair.

“Read this,” he said tersely, shoving a newspaper in front of her.

Mara saw the headline, then flipped the paper over to the back.

“I don’t see why people think the Knicks are a legitimate basketball team,” she said pointedly. “They never win.”

“It’s all bull,” said Josh. “They’re saying I’m a liar.”

“They’re going to do that.” She tapped his forearm lightly, then looked at the marshal. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

Mara looked up as the waitress brought a menu.

“Coffee to start, hon?” asked the waitress. She was younger than Mara, but already had the matronly waitress bit down pat.

“Please.” Mara took the menu.

“Maybe I’ll just go home,” said Josh darkly.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” answered Mara.

He curled his arms across his chest.

Mara looked at the marshal. “Beautiful day,” she said to him. “Not even cold.”

“Yup.”

“Is there fishing around here?”

“Outta season.”

“No hunting either, then, huh?”

“You hunt?”

“I’ve been known to.”

“Yeah. Outta season,” he said.

He sounded slightly skeptical, doubting that she did actually hunt. She was tempted to ask how bad he thought the breath of a Malaysian tiger stank, but didn’t.

“Isn’t there an amusement park or something around here?” she said instead.

“Sure. There’s Hershey’s out a ways,” said the marshal, his Texas accent twanging. “It’s like an amusement park.”

“Want to do that, Josh? Better than sitting around all day.”

He frowned.

The waitress brought her coffee. Mara ordered two eggs over easy with French toast, home fries, and bacon on the side.

“That’s what I like,” said the waitress. “A woman with an appetite.”

When she left, Mara leaned over and whispered in Josh’s ear. “Let’s ditch the chaperone. What do you say?” She put her hand on his thigh.

Josh turned red.

“Maybe we should go to Hershey’s,” he said aloud. Then he put his hand on hers, and squeezed before letting go.

“Hershey’s,” said Mara, straightening. “How do we get there?”

The marshal was just about to explain when Josh’s phone rang. It was Jablonski.

“Maybe you shouldn’t answer it,” said Mara.

But Josh did.

Jablonski was almost supernaturally calm.

“You really can’t take this too seriously,” said the political operative. “You have to expect the Chinese to fight back.”

“But they’re lying.”

“It’ll come out in the wash.” He pronounced “wash” as if it were spelled wha-sssshhhh. “Now what you need to do is get on down to D.C. for your congressional hearing. It’ll start promptly at one.”

“What hearing?”

“Senator Grasso’s. You’ll testify before his committee. Don’t worry, he’s now your biggest fan.”

“You didn’t tell me about a hearing.”

“It just came up. Don’t worry. It’ll go fine.” Jablonski made a sucking noise from the side of his mouth. “Listen, Josh, I have to get going. I’ll get someone to make hotel arrangements. You want to stay at the Watergate? Or you want a quiet place out of town?”

“Who gives a crap,” said Josh, killing the line.

18

Neither Christian nor Zeus spoke as they backed away, once more retracing their route away from the lookout station. They crossed the dirt road well out of view, then began moving east. The moon had risen; they had more than enough light to see by.

“We gotta take a break,” said Christian finally.

“Keep moving.”

Zeus caught sight of a bridge spanning another road. Apparently the camp had been set up at the confluence of several roads heading south.

They sat in a clump of bushes, wordlessly staring at each other as they rested. Both men were tired, but there was no question of spending the night this close to the Chinese. They’d move farther west, find a place to cross.

“I wonder what happened to the girl,” said Christian.

“Solt can take care of herself,” said Zeus.

“I mean that little kid the spy rescued. With the scientist and the Delta guys? Remember?”

“They were SEALs,” said Zeus.

“Whatever.”

“Big difference.”

Christian shrugged. “You liked SOCOM?”

SOCOM was Special Operations Command, where Zeus had been assigned prior to his promotion to major.

“It was good,” he said.

“You thinking of going back?”

“I’d like to.”

“This’ll help,” said Christian. “You got your career all mapped out?”

“Funny time to be talking about careers, Win.”

“What else we got to talk about?”

“True,” said Zeus. “No. You?”

“I used to. I had a line drawn straight through to chief of staff,” continued Christian, his voice softening so that it was barely audible.

“Perry has his eye on you.”

“You’re his fair-haired boy.”

“I thought he hated me because of Red Dragon.”

“He liked the fact that you kicked our ass in the war game.”

“Isn’t helping too much now.”

“All right,” said Christian, rolling slightly to the side and getting up. “Let’s go.”

“Be careful near the road,” said Zeus. “I’ll go first.”

Zeus slipped through the brush, slowly approaching the bridge. It had been built over a wide but shallow ravine, possibly a spot where water ran during the rainy season, or had run — the weather patterns were so hard to predict now. The Chinese hadn’t bothered to post guards, either because it was so close to the camp or because they simply didn’t expect the Vietnamese to be able to attack them from this direction.

They made their way to the bridge along the south side of the gully. Zeus paused under the bridge, noticing a set of wires overhead. The bridge had been wired with demolition charges.

The ravine narrowed into a deeper cut, slicing back to the north. They walked in the middle of it until they came to a pool of water. When they climbed up the side, Zeus saw a fence through the trees to his left.

He walked toward it, expecting that it was the border fence. But instead he saw green splotches and rectangles on the other side — they were still near the camp.

A field had been bulldozed from the jungle on the other side of the fence. It was filled with tanks — at least two dozen from what Zeus could see. There were other vehicles as well: personnel carriers, supply trucks. All were arranged in neat rows, as if they’d stumbled upon a used-car lot.

“Wow,” said Christian. “Where the hell did these come from? There have to be two companies, at least. That wasn’t in any of the briefings.”

The engine noises they’d heard earlier were a little louder here, but didn’t seem to be coming from the tanks. Zeus put his head against the fence to try and get a better view.

What was going on in there?

He dropped to the ground.

“What are you doing?” hissed Christian, dropping beside him.

“I’m going to go get a better look.”

“Where?”

“Inside.”

“Are you nuts?”

The fence was staked every six or eight feet. Zeus couldn’t budge the first one, but the next one he tried came out easily.

“Zeus,” hissed Christian as he slipped beneath the fence. “Zeus! Stop!”

19

They opted for a hotel in Alexandria, reaching it a little over an hour before Josh’s committee meeting was supposed to start.

Mara was just checking into her room when her cell phone rang. She pulled it from her pocket and without checking the number, answered.

“This is Mara.”

“Mara Duncan?”

“Yes?” she answered.

“This is Kyle O’Brien from CNN.”

Mara felt her fingers clench against the plastic of the phone.

“Ms. Duncan?”

“What can I do for you?” she said.

“I saw the video on YouTube — ”

“What video?”

“On YouTube.”

“What are you talking about? Who are you looking for?”

“Mara Duncan. Listen, Ms. Duncan — do you want to talk off the record?”

“Off the record about what?”

“Malaysia.”

“This conversation is over.”

It was all she could do to keep herself from slamming the phone to the ground.

Ten minutes later, Mara sat in the hotel’s tiny business center, watching a YouTube video that purported to be from a newscast on Malaysia television. It detailed a CIA operation that had killed twelve civilians, including two children. Her image was flashed on the screen several times.

According to the hit counter, the video had already been seen 3,289 times. It appeared to have been posted only an hour or two earlier.

Mara’s phone rang again. This time she examined the number before answering. It was an agency number.

Peter Lucas.

“Mara.”

“Mara, this is Peter — ”

“What the hell is going on?” she asked. “I just got a call from a reporter on CNN. Have you seen this YouTube video?”

“Which one?” asked Lucas.

“There’s more than one?”

“There’s one on the incident in Malaysia.”

“I saw that. I’m cut into a newscast. Where did it come from?”

“Where do you think?” said Lucas. “There’s one that focuses on you at the UN. Do a name search and you’ll find it.”

She did. A snippet of video of Josh and some others walking through the hall appeared. She was alongside for about three seconds, then eighteen in the slow-motion portion that followed the main part. Her head was conveniently circled with a light halo. The video had been seen only by 876 people.

There were three comments, all in English.

CIA agent Mara Duncan

Paid liar helps Vietnamese propaganda.

For better sex, call 202-555-8900

The number was her home phone number, fortunately disconnected a year before.

“The Chinese did this, obviously,” said Mara.

“That or you pissed off an old boyfriend.”

“I’m really, really not laughing, Peter.”

“Neither am I, Mara. Nor is the director.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Come in and we’ll talk about it. Where are you?”

“I’m in D.C.”

“Oh?…Well, good. Get over here.”

“Damn. Damn.”

“It’s not the end of the world.”

“Not for you. My cover’s totally blown.”

“In a way, they’re doing us a favor,” said Lucas. “We weren’t positive it was blown. Now we are.”

“You thought it was blown and you didn’t tell me? When?”

“When the money disappeared in Hanoi.”

“Well, thanks for telling me.”

“Yeah, I know. You’ll get through it. Listen, in the meantime, stay away from Josh MacArthur.”

“I’m hanging up, Peter.”

And she did.

20

Zeus crawled across a carpet of weeds and jungle debris, skirting the area where the tanks were parked.

They were large ZTZ99s — main battle tanks, massive beasts designed to do battle with the best the West had to offer, including the U.S. Army’s M1A1. The Vietnamese had nothing in their inventory that could match it.

Two dozen tanks, that he could see; undoubtedly more over the small hill to his right, just out of view. Where had they come from? They would surely have been spotted by American satellites on the way down, yet there hadn’t been one word about them in any of the briefings he’d given the Vietnamese.

They’d be seen soon, if they hadn’t been spotted already. At least one Global Hawk should be covering the area 24/7. All China and Southeast Asia now had the highest priority from the satellite surveillance program. The camo netting might throw off the count slightly, but something this large wasn’t going to escape notice.

Had they just gotten here?

Zeus kept crawling in the direction of the motor hum. It seemed more muffled inside the fence perimeter.

Strange.

There were voices to his left. Zeus froze, staring in the direction of the buildings, trying to see who was coming and where they were.

All he could see in the moonlight were hacked tree trunks, a small grove of them, clustered on a gentle rise.

He decided they would be good cover. Still crawling, he made his way toward them.

He didn’t realize they weren’t tree trunks until he reached them. They were plastic tubes sticking from the ground, covered in material and screening so that they looked like tree trunks.

Vents.

Just as the enormity of his discovery dawned on him, Zeus heard a fresh rumble fifty yards to the south. He raised his head in time to see a dark cloud billowing from behind the small hillock. Something emerged from it, moving toward the tanks he’d just passed.

Another tank. There was a vast underground garage below. The Chinese had moved down their tanks well before the beginning of the conflict, storing them here in preparation for this moment.

Two more tanks appeared while Zeus watched. They drove over to the field where the others were parked. Men scurried back and forth.

Zeus retreated, working his way back to the fence. A bank of clouds moved in, covering the moon; by the time he reached Christian, he could barely see two feet in front of him.

“What’s going on?” asked Christian.

“There’re a whole tunnel of tanks down there,” said Zeus. “I saw three more come out. God knows how many there are.”

“A tunnel or a bunker?”

“I don’t know. One way or the other, it’s vast. For all I know, it’s a tunnel that goes back to Beijing.”

“We’d better get out of here,” said Christian. “If they’re taking the tanks out, then they’re going to use them. Tonight.”

“We have to stop them,” said Zeus.

“Oh yeah, right. What do you suggest? Call in an air strike?”

“If I had a radio, I would.”

“Well, we don’t have a radio. And the Vietnamese couldn’t get close enough to attack them. Their best hope would be artillery, and most of that is to the west.”

“We can stop them,” said Zeus.

“Maybe we should steal one of the tanks and go south in it,” suggested Christian sarcastically.

He wasn’t serious, but Zeus thought about the idea. The tanks had three-man crews: a driver, a gunner, and a commander. Two men could easily handle it, if they knew what they were doing.

Which they didn’t. But Zeus wondered how hard it could be.

“You’re not really thinking about it,” said Christian.

“We could get into them. They don’t have any guards posted on this side. At least not that I could see.”

“It’s that last sentence that spells trouble.”

Zeus smiled. It was nuts.

“We have to get as far south as we can, as fast as we can,” added Christian. “Maybe we can warn the Vietnamese. It’s better than nothing.”

Calmer now that he was rested, Christian was back to being the somewhat competent Army officer he’d known before cracking. Ironically, now it was the nut they needed — the wild man, as Rosen used to say — a game-changing commander who could do the unexpected.

“Maybe we can blow up the tunnel,” said Zeus.

“How?”

“Those explosives back on the bridge.”

“Zeus… you have to plant explosive in pretty strategic spots to blow up a tunnel,” said Christian. “Or a garage or whatever the hell they have.”

“Maybe we can block the door.”

“You’re crazy.”

“We gotta do something,” said Zeus, starting back for the bridge.