Wall of Night

14

Even before they set foot in the water, Smitty dubbed it Lake Shriveljewels in anticipation of the effect the water was going to have on their anatomy. If not for their dry suits, he’d be right, Jurens decided. Even so, he could feel the cold pressing in on him, a watery glove encasing his body.

The goal of tonight’s exercise was to simply get past the guards waiting for them and wreak some benign havoc. The coming nights would bring increasingly difficult exercises that more closely matched the mission’s goals.

Jurens checked his depth gauge: twelve feet. One of the drawbacks of their LAR VII rebreathers was that it fed them pure oxygen, which quickly turned toxic at pressures below twenty feet. The beauty of LAR was that it created no bubble stream for enemy eyes to spot.

Jurens depressed the chin button inside his mask, then called, “Everybody with me?”

He got three double clicks in return.

Jurens resisted the impulse to glance back. The water was pitch black, visibility less than four feet. Under such conditions it was all too easy to lose someone. Here it was forgivable, but in real life, when one man made up a quarter of your team, it could be disastrous.

He checked his compass against the map on his diveboard. “Rally on my chemlite.”

He plucked the tube off his harness, crushed it to release the phosphorus, then dropped it. One by one the rest of the team swam forward out of the murk. They formed a ring and clasped forearms for what was jokingly called the “dead check”: If you were there, you weren’t dead.

“Going up,” Jurens said. “Standby.”

He clipped his diveboard to his harness, peeled back the glove covering his index finger, then flicked his fins until he felt his finger break the surface. The relatively cold air felt like an electric charge on his skin. He gave another flick of his fins. The top of his mask came clear.

The ice-rimmed shoreline lay fifteen feet away; beyond that, fifty yards inland, lay their Quonset hut and the three storage sheds, all illuminated by pole-mounted spotlights. Jurens knew the sentries were there, but not where and how many.

A flicker of movement near the corner of the Quonset caught his eye: A darker shadow against the blackness. There’s one. Sconi hovered still for the next five minutes, until sure he’d spotted all of them. There were eight guards — five on roving patrol and three hunkered down in the shadows.

Jurens let himself sink, then finned down to the team.

“How’s it look, Boss?” Dickie asked.

Jurens explained what he’d seen. “Let’s go play a little hide-and-seek.”

Loosening the ice along the shoreline was the easy part, since all they needed was a gap through which they could squeeze. The hard part was moving each chunk aside then replacing it behind them without making any noise. As it was, the roving guards periodically strolled along the shore, shining their flashlights into the water as Jurens and his team waited, mere shadows beneath the ice.

Once onto the beach, Jurens led them inland, following the shore to the tree line, where they slipped into the under-brush.

Sconi pulled out his binoculars and scanned the beach. All guards were accounted for. He watched for a few more minutes until sure the rovers hadn’t altered their routes, then set out again.

Giving the huts a wide berth, they slipped east through the trees along the ridge then across a field to the main road, where they found an irrigation ditch overgrown with scrub brush.

Jurens felt a tap on his shoulder. Smitty pointed toward their three o’clock: A hundred yards away, a Humvee sat blocking the road. Smitty gestured: Two inside, two outside.

That’s a mistake, Jurens thought. Better to sit back in the trees and wait for us to stumble onto them. He keyed his headset. “Anybody feel like taking a ride?”

Twenty minutes later they pulled the humvee to a stop in front of the Fort’s administration building. A pair of soldiers armed with M-16s stood on either side of the entrance. Jurens climbed out, followed by Smitty, Zee, and Dickie. One of the guards stepped forward, his gun coming up slightly.

Jurens flashed his temporary ID. “Son, go get your duty officer.”

The soldier eyed the ID. His eyes went wide. “Uh, yes, sir. Hold on.”

He trotted inside. Sixty seconds later he returned with a sleepy-eyed major wearing pajama bottoms and slippers. “What the hell is going on here?”

“Just wanted to return your property, Major,” Jurens said, then walked to the rear of the Humvee and opened the hatch. Inside, bound and gagged, were the four soldiers.

“Christ,” the Major muttered. “Are they—”

“They’re fine, Major. A little embarrassed, probably a lot pissed off, but fine. Now, if you don’t mind, could you point us to the chow hall? We’ve got some thawing out to do.”

Guoanbu director Xiang was enjoying his first cup of tea of the day and scanning the overnight reports when he came across a flagged message. He punched the intercom button. “Eng, come in here.”

His aide, Eng, was there in seconds. “Yes, sir?”

“This is a routine contact report,” Xiang said. “Why is this flagged?”

“Check the name, sir.”

Xiang scanned the message. “Officer Myung Niu—”

“The contact’s name, sir.”

“Chang Moh-Bian. So?”

“Bian’s an official at the Ministry of Agriculture. He’s on a watch list.”

Well, that doesn’t narrow the field much, Xiang thought. At any given time, the Guoanbu’s watch list contained thousands of names. “Regarding what?”

“General Han Soong. We’ve long suspected Bian of being an underground supporter of his.”

That got Xiang’s attention. “And what is he suspected of now … Fiddling with a fence post?”

“The next day the PSB checked it. It looked like it had been hollowed out. Could be a dead-letter drop. Add to that Bian’s demeanor and history, and I thought it might be worth your attention.”

Xiang considered this. It was probably nothing, but still, anything to do with Soong warranted caution. “Assign a detail to watch him. Might as well give it to this … Officer Niu.”

Two hours after a jogger found Samantha lying in the street, the phone rang in the Latham home. Whether from mother’s instinct or simply coincidence, Bonnie answered instead of Charlie. Hovering on the edge of sleep, he heard her say, “Oh, God. Where? Okay … yes, we’re on our way.”

He sat up. “Bonnie, what?”

She turned to him; her face was pale. “Charlie, it’s Samantha … She’s hurt.”

One call to Owens was all it took to get a helicopter dispatched to the Germantown airstrip near Latham’s home. As they were boarding the helicopter and heading south, Owens placed another call that cleared them for landing at the Newport News/Williamsburg airport, where a James City county sheriff was waiting to take them to Williamsburg Community Hospital Trauma Center.

They were met by the ER’s attending physician. “Agent Latham, Mrs. Latham, she’s still unconscious, but aside from a concussion, we haven’t found any head trauma. The CAT scan looked good, and she’s showing all the reactions we would hope to see—”

“You said she was unconscious,” Bonnie said. “What does that mean?”

“Her pupils are equal and reactive, and she’s reacting to pain stimulus. Those are all good signs. Her legs, however, worry us. Both of her femurs were fractured — the left one pretty badly.”

“Oh, God,” Bonnie cried. Charlie put his arms around her.

“Define ‘bad,’” Charlie said.

“We’re concerned about her distal pulse — the one farthest from the point of injury, in this case, the ankle. It’s weak, which might suggest artery damage. She’ll be heading to surgery shortly. We’ll know more in a couple hours.”

“And if there’s artery damage?” Bonnie asked.

“Let’s just cross that bridge if we come to it.”

Irreparable artery damage, Latham thought. Amputation.

Bonnie asked, “Can we see her?”

“Sure, I’ll take you to her.”

Latham felt like he was in a fog. Somebody hurt my girl … my God, somebody hurt my child.