Threat Vector

SEVENTY-SEVEN

Adam Yao and Jack Ryan had been racing south through the city when they saw the Hornet hit by a SAM. They watched the plane fly on to the south, leaving the electric glowing haze over Guangzhou and entering the darkness over the Pearl River Delta, then it pitched down, and then they just barely caught a glimpse of the ejection at a distance of one mile before the pilot disappeared below the buildings between them and the aircraft.

Adam increased speed on Nansha Gang, desperate to get to the downed flier before the police or military, who would certainly be on their way. There were a few vehicles out at this time, but not many. Adam liked the wide-open road for purposes of making good time, but he worried that his little two-door stuck out like a sore thumb on the nearly empty streets.

This was a fool’s errand and they both knew it, but they agreed they could not just leave without knowing the man’s fate.

The PLA was out all over the city, as well as the local police, and this made the two Americans nervous, although there were no roadblocks or other barriers to travel. The attack was over now, and it was an attack the city had clearly been surprised by, so the military and police did little more than drive around, looking for the pilot or hassling pedestrians who came out into the streets to see what was going on.

But Adam and Jack had a head start on the civilians; they were out of the city now.

Big transport helicopters passed them, raced on to the south, and disappeared in the night.

“They’re going the same place we’re going,” Jack said.

“Guarantee it,” agreed Yao.

Twenty minutes after the jet crashed and the pilot ejected, Yao and Ryan rolled past the location of the crash, a field that ran along a tributary of the Pearl River. The helicopters had landed there, and troops had fanned out into a large copse of trees to the east. Ryan saw flashlight beams all through the trees.

Adam drove on by the crash site. He said, “If the pilot is in those trees, they’ve got him. There’s nothing we can do. If he made it to the river, though, he would have floated downstream. We can check it out at least.”

Adam turned at the river, passed row after row of storage sheds where the locals kept grains and fertilizer and other equipment for the nearby rice fields, and then they drove onto a narrow dirt road. Yao looked at his watch, saw it was just after three in the morning, and he knew it would be a miracle if they saw anyone or anything down here at all.

After ten minutes of driving very slowly along the water, the men noticed flashlights shining from a bridge just a few hundred meters on. Jack pulled Adam’s binoculars out of his pack and looked at the scene, and saw there were four civilian cars on the bridge, and a group of men in civilian clothing were scanning intently into the water.

“Those guys had the same idea we did,” Jack said. “If the pilot is in the river, he’s going to pass right under them.”

Adam stayed on the gravel road until he made it to a parking lot next to a warehouse near the bridge; then he pulled in and parked.

“This place is going to be crawling with PLA or local cops. I want you to stay right here, low in the back of the car. I’m going to head up to the bridge to see if I can see anything.”

Jack said, “Okay, but call me if you do.”

Yao left the car, and he left Jack there in the pitch blackness.

Yao found himself in a group of a dozen civilians and two PLA soldiers on the bridge. They were cursing the damn pilot. Someone said they were Taiwanese aircraft that attacked the city, but others thought that man was a fool, because Taiwan would attack China only if it wanted to commit mass suicide.

They peered into the water, certain that the parachute was seen landing in the river, but Adam could not find anyone in the group who either saw the chute himself or spoke firsthand to a person who did.

It seemed like an exercise in angry groupthink, each man talking about what he would do to the pilot if he were the one to fish him out of the water. The soldiers had rifles, of course, but many of the other men on the bridge held rakes, pitchforks, lengths of pipe, or tire irons.

Yao knew that the pilot, if he had indeed survived the ejection and if he had indeed managed to avoid getting captured closer to the crash site, would be luckier to get caught by regular Army troops than to fall into this or any other group of vigilantes who would be up and down the river hunting for him.

One of the men in the group with a light had gone to the downstream side of the bridge, and there he scanned the water. With everyone else focusing upriver, thinking they could see a man in the water for a hundred yards before he passed, no one else adopted the downriver tactic.

But to Yao’s astonishment the man called out, said he saw something. Yao and the other men ran across the road to the railing, peered down into the light illuminating the brown river, and there was a man. All arms and legs were out, away from his body; he wore a green flight suit and a few other pieces of gear but no helmet. Adam thought the man looked dead, but he was faceup, so he could just be unconscious.

Yao pressed a button on his mobile to redial the last number he’d called, which he knew was Jack’s phone.

As Yao stepped back away from the railing, one of the soldiers fired his rifle at the form as he floated downstream, leaving the light of the flashlight beam. A dozen other flashlights chased the pilot off into the darkness.

Everyone on the bridge began running to the bank or climbing into their cars, wild with the chase and desperate to be among the first to pull the devil out of the water.

Jack answered the phone, and Yao said, “Get behind the wheel and head south now!”

“I’m on the way.”

Jack picked Adam up, and they raced down the gravel road along the riverbank. They quickly passed all the men on foot, but three cars were well ahead of them.

They’d gone no more than a quarter-mile when they saw the cars parked by the side of the road. The riverbank was another forty yards off on their right, and flashlight beams moved along the river grasses there.

“They’ve got him,” Yao said. “Damn it!”

“The hell they do,” said Jack, and he pulled the car over next to the others. He reached into Adam’s workbag and pulled out a folding knife, climbed out of the car quickly, and told Yao to follow him.

But he did not immediately run down to the shouting commotion at the riverbank. Instead he ran to each of the three cars and jabbed the knife into two tires on each vehicle. High-pitched hisses filled the air as the two men then rushed through the dark toward the flashlight beams dancing at the water’s edge.

Twenty-eight-year-old Brandon White was five feet, nine inches tall and one hundred fifty-three pounds. He was not a fearsome sight unless he was seated in the cockpit of his F/A-18 with his helmet on and his weapons at his fingertips. And at this moment, as he lay on the rocky, grassy riverbank surrounded by men who kicked and hit him, with a broken arm, pre-hypothermia, and pre-exhaustion, he looked like little more than a rag doll.

There were thirteen men in the scrum around him. He hadn’t seen any faces before he took the first blow in the side of the head from a man’s shoe. After that he’d kept his eyes closed; he’d tried to stand once, but there were too many men beating on him for him to even get a chance to make it up to his knees.

He had a pistol on his flight suit, strapped to his chest, but each time he tried to get his left hand up and awkwardly pull the weapon out of its right-sided retention holster, someone else would knock him down or snatch his arm away.

Finally someone pulled the weapon out of the holster and pointed the gun at Brandon’s head. Another man knocked the gun away, insisting that the crowd be allowed to beat the pilot to death.

He felt a floating rib in his lower back crack, and then he felt a sharp, jabbing pain in his thigh. He’d been stabbed with a pitchfork, and he cried out, and he was jabbed again, and he kicked at the source of the pain, only striking the iron tool with the top of his boot, breaking a toe.

He then heard grunts of pain from someone else, which was odd, because he had been the only one around taking a beating, and he opened his eyes in confusion to see a flashlight fall to the ground. One of his attackers fell down next to him and then men shouted in Chinese and yelled in shock and surprise.

The crack of a rifle at close range made him cringe his battered body. The gunshot was answered by another, and then a PLA soldier fell down on top of him. Brandon lunged for the man’s rifle, got his noninjured arm out and his hand wrapped around it, but he was not strong enough to wield it with one hand. Still, shouting panicked men tried to pull the gun away, but Brandon rolled on top of it, held it tight, protected it with every ounce of strength that remained.

Now the long burst of a fully automatic rifle pierced the air, and he felt and heard the men around him scrambling, falling, then getting back up and running away. He heard men splash into the river, and others racing along the muddy riverbank, their feet slapping the muck as they fled.

After another burst of automatic fire, Brandon opened his eyes and saw flashlights lying all around the riverbank. In the light of one of these beams he saw an armed man; he was taller and broader than any of his attackers, and also unlike them, he wore a paper mask over his face.

The man knelt over a PLA soldier whose lifeless form lay in the grass, and he took a magazine of rifle cartridges from his chest and reloaded the gun. Then the man turned away and shouted to someone higher up on the bank: “Get behind the wheel. I’ll carry him up there.”

Was that English?

The man knelt over White now. “Let’s get you home.”

Jack Ryan, Jr., helped the wounded pilot into the back of the car, then climbed in behind him. Adam slammed his foot down on the gas, and the little vehicle sped to the south, passing several civilians by the road whom Ryan had just chased away from the pilot with the rifle taken from the hapless soldier whose throat Ryan had slit on the riverbank a minute earlier.

Adam did not know these roads, but he did know there was no way in hell they would make it long in a car that would be reported by a dozen men to the Army within moments.

He thought about helicopters in the air, about police roadblocks, about roving convoys of soldiers searching for the downed pilot and the spies who rescued him.

“We’ve got to get another car,” he announced to Ryan.

Jack said, “Okay. Try and find a van, something where we can lay this guy out flat, he’s hurt pretty bad.”

“Right.”

Jack looked into the eyes of the pilot. He could see the pain and shock and confusion, but he also saw that the guy was very much alive. His flight suit said White on the chest.

“White?” Jack said. “Here’s some water.” Jack opened a Nalgene bottle he pulled from Adam’s bag and offered to pour it into the Marine captain’s mouth.

The pilot took the bottle himself with his good hand and took a swig. “Call me Trash.”

“I’m Jack.”

“Another aircraft went down. Before mine.”

“Yeah. We saw it.”

“The pilot?”

Ryan shook his head slowly. “I have no idea. I didn’t see what happened.”

Trash closed his eyes for a long time. Jack thought he’d passed out. But then he said, “Cheese.”

Trash’s eyes opened now. “Who are you guys?”

Jack said, “We’re friends, Trash. We’ll get you someplace safe.”

“Tell me whatever the hell we hit was worth it.”

“Whatever you hit?” Jack asked. “You don’t know what you bombed?”

“Some building,” Trash said. “All I know is that me and Cheese nailed the fuck out of it.” The car hit a pothole, sloshing the two men in the back, and the Marine winced in pain. Adam then pulled onto a larger road, heading to the southeast for Shenzhen.

Jack fell to the side, but he sat back up and said, “Captain, with what you did back there, you may have prevented a war.”

Trash closed his eyes again. “Bullshit.” He said it softly.

Moments later Jack was sure he was asleep.