Girl Rides the Wind (11 page)

She wanted to push him away for that remark, but it hurt too much. “Show me the damn video, then. Let’s see what’s so all-fired important about this.” She lowered herself into the desk-chair with another little shriek.

The video on the flash-drive opened on a scene in a rural cemetery, a peasant’s funeral, perhaps a farm-girl. A banner above the gate showed the name of the deceased, and the camera panned across the crowd of mourners, all dressed in their best clothes, which weren’t all that fine, though their grief was easy enough to see.

“Who’s Yu Mei?” Emily asked. “Why are we interested in her?”

“I don’t know. Theo didn’t say. Probably doesn’t know either.”

“Don’t you have some ointment? You know, some sort of topical anesthetic?”

Perry pulled open a drawer under his bunk and handed her a tube. When she winced, trying to reach down to rub it across her ribs, he took it from her and began to apply it liberally to both sides of her body.

“You really are helpless, you know,” he said.

“That’s why I keep you around.”

A commotion seized the crowd in the video as several soldiers, armed with automatic weapons, entered the cemetery, and the camera panned left to catch a glimpse of a shiny, black sedan pulling up to the gate.

“This doesn’t look like it’s gonna end well,” Perry muttered. “Check out that limo. Talk about being out of place…”

The driver opened the rear passenger door and two PLA officers stood up from behind the tinted windows, just as the camera began to pan back to the crowd of mourners.

“Is that who I think it is?” Emily exclaimed.

“Who?”

The older man must have lingered off screen, by the gate, but the younger man walked back into the scene, catching up to the movement of the camera.

“Diao. Don’t you recognize him?”

Perry pressed his face closer to the laptop, straining to make out finer facial details. The soldiers pushed a few of the peasants aside to make way for the young man.

“Shit, you’re right. That is Diao.”

“Now what on earth is he doing at a peasant girl’s funeral? Who the hell is Yu Mei to him?”

“Does the name mean anything?”

Emily pondered the question for a moment. “I think it means Jade Plum, though it could probably also mean something like ‘enduring virtue.’ It sounds like a typical peasant name, you know, expressing the hopes and dreams of her parents. Does that make sense?”

Perry nodded and grunted, and they both watched as the camera continued to pan right. Finally, it showed the memorial itself that all the mourners had come to see. A lavish floral arrangement framed a large photo of the deceased.

“I doubt these people could have afforded that display,” Perry said.

“It can’t be,” Emily cried out, as the camera lingered on the photo.

“What is it?”

“Oh, shit. Yu Mei is Diao Chan. This is
her
funeral. Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.”

“You mean the woman…”

“… whose head I separated from her shoulders three years ago. That’s exactly who it is.”

“Wait. I thought the samurai, you know, Kano’s father, I thought he did that.”

“No. I did it. It was his father’s idea to say he did it so as not to give General Diao’s people something to rally around.”

“Oh, shit. Do you think Diao knows it was you?”

“No… maybe… who knows? But does it really matter? I mean, he’s gotta know I was involved somehow, right?”

“I guess.”

“One thing’s for sure, whatever he knows, or thinks he knows, he’s not here by accident.”

The door swung open and Theo entered, squeezing a sheaf of papers under one arm and clutching a case in that hand, and trying to hold up his dress uniform in a garment bag without letting it touch the floor, all of which kept him from noticing Perry and Emily right away.

“What the hell are you two up to?” he snorted, once he’d found a place for the uniform.

“Nothing at all,” Perry said, as he scrambled to collect Emily’s clothes.

“Those are some nasty bruises you have there, girl.”

“Bruises… what bruises?” Emily put on her best business-as-usual face, as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about her sitting in her underwear in their quarters. When Theo seemed undeterred by this prevarication, she tried another tack. “I was just doing some PT with the Devildogs.”

“Let me guess,” Theo said. “Tarot and Racket?”

“Who else?” Perry replied, handing her pants over her shoulder.

“Are you gonna write ’em up?”

“What for? It was my idea.”

“How on earth does that even make any sense?”

Emily squealed and hissed in pain as she tried to step into both legs of the pants at once, then glanced up at Theo. “Don’t worry. It’s really nothing.”

“Nothing, my ass,” he roared. “How the hell do you expect to participate in the Asuncion Island exercise? You can barely move.”

“I’ll be ready.” She tried easing her arms into both sleeves before pulling the shirt over her head, then thought better of it, backed her arms out and pulled the collar over her head. “Perry, hold the damn sleeve for me.”

“Fine,” Theo said. “I take it you saw the video. Connie and Michael couldn’t quite figure out why Jiang thought it was so important. Any ideas?”

“Oh, she’s come up with something,” Perry said.

“Yeah, what?”

“The funeral is for Diao Chan.”

“No, it can’t be. According to your mom, the banner in the video reads Plum Jewel, or something, definitely not Diao Chan.”

“That’s just it,” Emily replied. “Diao Chan wasn’t her real name. No one names their kid that. It’d be like calling her Mata Hari, or something. She must have taken the name to curry favor with General Diao.”

“What about this guy?” Theo asked, pointing at the still image of Capt Diao, frozen at the end of the video. “Is that really his name?”

“It’s hard to say, but somehow I doubt it. Look at his face. He’s at that funeral because he cared about her, probably loved her, and not like a sister…”

“… and you cut her head off,” Perry added.

“Shit,” Theo said.

“Yeah, that probably didn’t put me in his good books.”

“As dangerous as you think he is, shouldn’t we do something about it, maybe tell the Admiral?” Perry asked.

“Which reminds me,” Theo said. “The Admiral wants us on the
Blue Ridge
for a briefing at nineteen-hundred-hours. You gonna be able to walk by then?”

“Real funny. I’ll be ready. And, no, I don’t think we tell anyone what we know about Diao yet. Has the Admiral been briefed on Kano’s letter?”

“Yup. That’s where I’ve been all morning. The chatter over that letter is all anyone’s been talking about over there, and whether we can continue with Operation Seabreeze after the Asuncion Drill.”

“We can’t just call it off, can we?” Emily said. “Won’t that make matters worse?”

“Yup. We’re definitely gonna be walking on eggshells through this whole thing,” Theo said. “We don’t want to precipitate an incident by backing out, but we run the risk of causing one if we continue and anything goes awry.”

They looked at each other for a moment, each one beginning to feel the burden they might all have to share soon enough. Perry crouched down to tie Emily’s shoes.

“Okay, cinch her up and get Miss Creaky out of here,” Theo said. “We’ve got work to do before this evening.”

“
C
olón
, eyes on the passageway,” Perry said. “She’ll be here any minute. Durant, watch the kitchen.”

“Farah,” Durant shouted as quietly as he could manage. “Get away from the steam-table. We’re not here to eat.”

LCpl Khaled Farah looked up, having already stacked a plate with fried chicken. The son of Jordanian immigrants, Farah joined the Corps right out of high school, and told his unit-buddies it was because he didn’t want to work in the family restaurant. Judging from his appetite for fried foods, they all assumed his parents had kicked him out for eating up all the profits. Eventually, they started calling him Falafel, but this name died a natural death when everyone saw how much chicken he would consume in a typical day. A new name had yet to take hold.

“I’m hungry, Sarge.”

“There’ll be time for that later.”

“Why all the cloak and dagger, sir?” Tarot asked.

Perry’s left eye twitched as he turned to face the squad, which had begun to arrange itself around a table in the far corner of the Enlisted Mess. The Jarheads shrunk back and tried to make themselves as small as possible.

“You want to know why, Tarot. I’ll tell you why.” Perry paused when he began to feel a vein on the side of his neck twitch. His mouth had already formed a perfect ‘O’ and the breath in his lungs wanted an outlet, and the bitter, green taste of his own churning stomach would not go back down easily… but tearing them all the proverbial “new one” seemed less useful an approach now than it had a moment earlier.

“Sir…” Tarot ventured, after a bewildering moment of silence. Perry held up a finger.

“I ought to throw you meatheads in the brig… In fact, I don’t know why I haven’t already.”

“But, sir…”

“Oh, wait. I remember.” He turned to glance back at Durant before continuing, who shrugged. “She asked me not to. You clowns were this close to not seeing the sun for… for… a long goddamn time. And don’t give me any crap about how she made you do it.”

“In all fairness, LC…” Durant said. “It can be difficult to refuse her…”

“You didn’t see the bruises, Sarge,” Perry said, nearly yelling again. After another long breath, he stared each of them down. “Here’s your new task, each and every one of you… no, your mission here on Earth: You will make damn sure nothing untoward befalls her from now on.”

“From now on?” Racket said.

“Until the end of time… not a damn thing. Do you get me?”

“Yes, sir” the squad answered in a ragged, embarrassed unison.

Colón whistled from the doorway and then stepped quickly to the table in the back. A moment later, Theo entered the room, followed by Emily, and everyone stood at attention.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Theo said to Durant. “For operational security, your presence is no longer needed.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and exited the mess.

“Lieutenant Tenno, have you formulated your plans?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, patting a rolled up map pinned under one arm. “We have contingencies for three separate incursions.”

“Remember, your mission is not to confront our operators.” He turned to face the rest of the squad. “This is not a live-fire exercise. Even though you will be armed with non-lethals, as will the coalition teams, you will not be weapons-free.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your objective is to test the ability of the coalition teams to communicate effectively in battlefield conditions, without benefit of translators.”

“Without translators?” Racket asked.

“Their objective is to maneuver with code-word comms only, to encircle or overrun your positions, and to avoid any friendly-fire outcomes.”

“And our objective is to evade, confound and, if possible, to lure them into a friendly-fire situation,” Emily said.

“Is enemy capture an allowed result, sir?” Tarot asked.

“Yes, within limits,” Theo said. “But excessively hazardous situations are to be avoided, to the extent possible.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Colón said. “… uh, with all due respect, sir.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know, Corporal. That’s why I emphasized that your charge is not to confront the coalition teams, but to evade and confound.”

Once the briefing was over, Farah made a beeline for the fried chicken, followed by Tarot and Racket. Just inside the entrance, Perry and Theo stood with her for a moment and a few last words, as the kitchen crew came out to check on the steam-table, and a few hungry sailors began to straggle in for MID RATS, otherwise know as midnight rations, now that Theo had released the room to them.

“The Admiral wants this to be your operation,” he said, and Emily nodded.

“That means it’s yours to screw up,” Perry said.

“I won’t let you down.”

“It also means you’ll be exposed, you know, in case Diao is looking for an opportunity,” Theo said. “Let your squad have your back on this one.”

“Yeah,” Perry said, echoing that sentiment. “This isn’t the moment for individual achievement.”

“Right, whatever,” she said. “I know how to take care of myself… and my men.”

“No heroics, you got me?” Theo said. “That’s an order. You leave that shit to Tarot and Racket. They’re not targets like you are.”

Emily grunted and glowered at them, and turned back to her men.

“Martinovich will be ready to ferry them over at oh-two-hundred,” Perry said. “That gives her ninety minutes.”

“That’ll be plenty. She’s got the same satellite imagery the rest of the teams do. All she needs to do is choose their spots and get them dug in.”

“The first incursion leaves at oh-four-thirty. She’s gonna have to get those meatheads moving.”

“At least she’s not limping anymore. She was like the walking wounded when we met with the Admiral.”

“Do you think he noticed?” Perry asked.

“How could he not?”

“Well… he didn’t let on, that’s for sure.”

“He’s known her as long as we have. Maybe he’s just used to her ways. I take it you talked to her men…”

“Yup,” Perry said. “Their minds are in the right place now.”

I
t took less
arm-twisting than she expected, but Martinovich lifted off with her squad and equipment on board, and Billy Baca in the co-pilot’s seat of a CH-46E at zero-one-thirty. They touched down thirty minutes later on the north end of Pagan Island.

One of the largest of the Northern Marianas islands, Pagan is really more like two islands formed by the peaks of two strato-volcanoes, connected by a narrow strip of land. Like several of the islands at the northern end of the chain, volcanic eruptions forced evacuations of all residents, leaving them uninhabited, though Admiral Crichton was convinced a few homesteaders had returned to occupy the southern end of Pagan and insisted on steering clear of them.

Complex negotiations with the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, lasting several years in the face of substantial public demonstrations in Guam and Saipan, had delayed the Navy’s access to the northernmost islands, and sensitivities were still high.

“You know what to do?” Emily asked, yelling over the rotor noise as Tarot and Racket hauled two large packs off the back ramp.

“You bet, LT,” Colón replied. “We set up a decoy camp near the upper lake, and then hot-foot it down the east face, leaving a trail to the southern escarpment.”

“Do you have the flares?”

“Yes ma’am,” Farah replied. “We got this. You don’t need to worry about us.”

Emily nodded and stepped off the Phrog’s back ramp onto a black sand beach on the western edge of Mount Pagan. Martinovich eased the bird back into the sky and roared off toward the northern slope, and Emily indicated a lagoon on the far end of the beach, cut off from the ocean by a narrow spit of land and filled with a mixture of rainfall and storm wash-over.

“Over there, in the heights above the water. We’ll build the first one there.”

“That’s gotta be five hundred feet up,” Tarot said.

“We don’t have much time. Let’s get moving.”

“No way, LT,” Racket said, inserting himself between Emily and one of the smaller packs. “We got this.”

“What are you doing?” Tarot whispered at him.

“We need you to clear a path for us, LT.”

“Fine,” she said. “Whatever. Give me the big torch.”

Jungle foliage partially covered the slopes, though large open patches where the volcanic soil seemed to have discouraged any growth made finding a path easy, especially under a bright moon. The three of them picked their way around the southern edge of the lagoon, ducking under palm fronds and stepping through tall grass. Higher up, the palm foliage gave way to Australian scrub pines, until they cleared the volcanic tree line.

“See,” she said. “It’s like we thought. From the sea it looks forested, but up here it’s barren, which means we’ll be able to move much more quickly than they’ll expect.”

“How’s this spot?” Tarot asked. “It’s not fully concealed.”

“Yup. You know what to do.”

Racket set to work building an impromptu shelter from fallen trees and larger limbs, while Tarot dragged logs down the slope above them to form a low barricade. A thin, straight branch, eight or nine feet long, wedged among the logs formed a sort of flagpole, to which he attached a red cloth.

“Set it up so the smokers go off in an hour,” Racket said.

“This isn’t rocket science, you know,” Tarot said. “They’ll go off when they go off. How’s your fire-pit coming along?”

Emily called down from a ridge a hundred feet above them. “We’re running short of time, guys. Let’s get moving.”

They shouldered the now-somewhat-lighter packs and scrambled up to her position, but she had already moved on, the beam from her flashlight showing them where she’d gone. Behind the ridge a second forested area had grown up since the most recent eruption, and barren hollows, some as deep as fifty feet, had formed in places where the lava flows must have collapsed. Emily’s path along the ridgeline was easy to follow, since it was still devoid of any foliage, though Tarot and Racket weren’t able to close the gap running with their packs.

“You guys are so slow,” she called back to them, finally turning to wait. “See what all that pumping iron gets you – heavy legs and slow feet.”

“This from the only one here not carrying a pack,” Tarot said.

“There, at the other end of that depression, that’s the beginning of the escarpment. That’s where Colón and Farah should be, if they’re still on schedule.”

Another twenty minutes, and stopping here and there to give Tarot a moment to catch his breath, and they met up with the other half of the squad. The escarpment was really just the leading edge of a much larger and older depression formed in the mountainside, a sheer cliff-face oriented toward the peak, with rock formations suggesting that it was much older than the most recent eruptions, perhaps centuries older.

“Did you let our freak-flag fly?” Emily asked.

“Yes, ma’am. We’ve got smokers set to go off by the upper lake in twenty.”

“We better get started on this camp,” Farah said. “Unless they totally screw up, they should be here in an hour or so.”

“… and we don’t resist, right?” Racket asked.

“No, not today,” Emily said. “But once we spot them, probably on that ridge, we bug out and see if they can mount a coordinated pursuit.”

“False trails?”

“Good idea. Why don’t you and Tarot create one heading down that way, toward that rocky point south-southeast…”

“… and our actual escape route?” Farah asked.

“How about we rappel down the cliff once they make top of the ridge?” Colón said.

“Not bad,” Emily said. “The footing’s pretty good down there. We can lead them on a merry chase and double back toward the lagoon. Maybe let ’em catch up to us down there. I’ll set up the ropes while you two finish the camp.”

In the end, an amphibious assault successfully overran the ‘terrorist’ camp. The smoke grenades went off more or less on schedule, and the various flags and trails they’d left led all the teams to converge at the last camp on the escarpment. Actually managing to capture the target squad proved a bit more difficult, but no friendly-fire situations were created, and comms functioned adequately.

A second exercise the next day, this time on Asuncion island, required helo-drops and fast-rope insertions, since the slopes of the central peak terminate on all sides in cliffs at the water’s edge. The simpler terrain of Asuncion made this an endurance challenge – no packs to carry, and minimal advance-prep – Emily meant to make them think on the run. In this case, the plan was to zigzag up the gentler southern slope, keeping cover in the coconut palm forest that dominates the lower elevations, and then to circle around through the sword grass on the north slope. Smoke grenades were deployed no longer as clues, but as offensive weapons, of a sort, making pursuit difficult and covering their movements. A ravine on the west side allowed the squad to double-back down to the lower cover of the palm forest, where they could be captured with relative ease.

The final exercise took place at night on Agrihan, an island formed from the top of an undersea volcano. The cone had blown off the top of the mountain in a major eruption a century earlier, leaving a flat top and an elliptical caldera over fifteen-hundred feet deep. The remnants of that eruption were still visible in the lava flows at the bottom of the caldera. Another endurance test, Emily’s squad led the coalition forces through the palm forests on the east side of the mountain. Taking advantage of the darkness, they returned to trap a portion of the Philippine contingent, including Capt Ongpin and Cpl Iwatani, in a ravine where the sword grass was tall enough to conceal her squad even in daylight. Emily set off flares to end the exercise once they’d completed the ‘capture’.

“
G
ood work
, Lance Corporal,” Durant said. “You guys really showed our coalition partners what a Marine can do.”

“Yes, sir,” Tarot replied. He glanced over at Lt ‘Ninja’ and turned quickly away.

“You should have seen these two chasing after LT,” Colón said. “It was like their lives depended on it.”