Shock of War (15 page)

He didn't bother looking back, crawling on his belly through the weeds.

Something was better than nothing.

What if he blew the entrance to the tunnel? Could he get close enough?

Doubtful.

He could string the explosives together, push them down the air tube.

That might work.

He started crawling in that direction.

“Where are you going?” hissed Christian in the darkness behind him.

Startled, Zeus stopped. “Where are you?”

“Jesus, I'm right here. Two feet away.”

“I thought you were staying back,” said Zeus.

“What's the plan?”

“I'm not sure yet. There are air vents—”

“I have an idea,” said Christian.

“Okay.”

“They won't get very far if we blow up their fuel.”

“Their tanks must be underground.”

“They have some trucks lined up near the personnel carriers. Didn't you see them before?”

It was a brilliant, logical, simple plan. But the most amazing thing was that it had come from Christian.

“Show me,” said Zeus.

*   *   *

They didn't see the guard walking
along the line of tanks until he was less than ten yards away. Fortunately, the man was looking toward the fence line, and Zeus was close enough to the armored personnel carriers to cut between them and hide. Christian followed.

“Guard,” whispered Zeus as he squatted.

“Yeah.”

Zeus waited, chest tight.

They'd take the guard if he came this way. Zeus put the charges down, ready to leap out.

The man didn't appear. Finally, Zeus leaned forward and looked around the end of the vehicle.

The soldier was gone.

“Stay here,” Zeus told Christian. “I'm going to scout ahead. I want to make sure we won't be seen”

“Go.”

There was no light in the compound, but the moon was strong enough for him to see fairly well. The row of APCs gave way to tanks. As Zeus reached the back of the second tank, he saw the fuel trucks off to the right. Two were parked next to a pile of bulldozed debris, dirt, tree trunks, and rocks in a long mound. The fence cut toward the mound, running along to the right as far as Zeus could see.

He made his way to the mound, crawling along the side nearest the fence. There were more fuel trucks—a half dozen. Another row behind that.

Blow up one with each charge. Shrapnel from the blast might damage others. In any event, it would slow their advance considerably—the tanks could only go so far without topping off.

How many trucks were there? He lay at the top of the hill, staring.

Two dozen.

What was the ratio the Chinese used? God, that he should know—that was a factor in the game somewhere.

Five tanks to one truck?

Six?

No. Three?

It had to be more than three, or there were more trucks.

He couldn't think. And what did it matter now? Just blow the damn things up and be done with it.

Voices came to him as the wind shifted. Belatedly, Zeus realized there were men on the far side of the trucks all the way to his right.

He slid closer, trying to see.

Gradually, he realized what they were up to—filling the tankers with fuel from an underground tank.

He slipped back to Christian.

“They're putting fuel in them now. Let's go.”

“Where?”

“Come on.” Zeus shoved the demo packs back into his pockets. “Come on.”

“What do we do after we plant the charges?”

“Go back the same way we came.”

Zeus leapt up, heart pounding in his chest. He was suddenly on an adrenaline high, feeling no pain, completely focused on his mission. He rounded the corner of the APC. The moist jungle air felt heavy in his chest, thick.

Zeus glanced up, trying to gauge how far he was from the pile of debris. As he did, he saw the soldier he'd spotted earlier come out from behind the truck, then look directly at him.

2

CIA headquarters, suburban Virginia

Mara was on her way upstairs
to see Peter Lucas when she decided to take a detour to Starbucks. The coffee shop, located on the ground floor of the CIA's main building at Langley, was reputedly one of the busiest Starbucks in the country. Mara could agree with that—the place was always jammed. She took her place in line.

“Well, speak of the devil and she appears,” said a voice behind her as she debated whether to go for a regular or a latte. She'd moved about two feet in five minutes. “Mara Duncan, I hope you are well.”

Mara turned and saw Jimmy “Grease” Parnel standing with his arms folded in front of his chest. The ceiling lights glared off his bald head, and his round face sported a wide smile. Grease had earned his nickname long ago, when he'd been able to make things happen: “greasing the wheels of progress” as he put it when he deigned to explain where the name had come from.

“Grease,” said Mara. “How are you? I thought you were retired.”

“No kiss?” He offered his cheek. She snorted in derision. “You don't know what you're missing,” he said.

“Ignorance is bliss.”

“I can vouch for that.”

The line shifted. Mara moved with it. Grease took a spot near the back.

Grease
was
retired—he'd been shot up badly a few years while helping the Philippines government. Grease had spent somewhere over thirty years working in various places in Asia. He'd even been in Malaysia, briefly, when Mara was there, which was how she knew him.

She got her coffee—just a regular—and moved around toward the end of the line. Grease was chatting up two young—and pretty—office workers. Add their ages together, and they'd still come up more than a few years shy of his.

“Ask this one,” he told them, nodding toward Mara. “She'll tell you.”

“Tell them what?”

“How good I am in bed.”

“He's good, all right,” said Mara. “Loudest snorer in the bunch.”

“Only after a full meal and extra dessert,” said Grease. “And I don't mean ice cream.”

The two women exchanged a glance, then did their best to ignore them.

“You're going to get written up for sexual harassment,” said Mara.

“That's the beauty of being a contract worker,” said Grease. “I can't be fired.”

“They can terminate your contract.”

“For flirting? If I knew it was that easy, I would have tried it years ago.”

“I wouldn't elevate what you do to the status of flirting,” countered Mara.

“Be kind.” Grease winked at her. “Hang on for a minute, will you? I have to get my caffeine fix.”

Grease ordered an Americano—a shot of espresso in water, so that it had the flavor of a very strong coffee.

“Reminds me of the coffee machine in the Bangkok office,” he said, putting a top on the cup.

“I doubt that,” said Mara.

“How is Bangkok?”

“Still there, last I saw.”

Grease smiled. They walked out into the hall. “You coming in to see Peter?”

“Something like that.”

“I'm working for him,” said Grease. “Come on.”

They walked past the glassed-in courtyard and across to a staircase, taking it down three flights. That was Grease—pushing seventy, with more replacement parts in him than a used car, and he still preferred what he called “the juice of the dance” to being carried.

He told Mara that he had been called back “to take a look at things” in Vietnam and China.

“A lot going on,” he said as they cleared the second landing and headed for the third. “This Cho Lai—he's some piece of work.”

“The Chinese were desperate for a strong leader,” said Mara.

“They got that in spades,” said Grease. Downstairs, they passed a security point, then entered a part of the building strongly shielded against eavesdropping equipment. Grease buzzed them through a door into a secure hallway with a series of small offices. These were temporary workplaces, where temporary assignees like Grease could hold conversations and work with sensitive material. He paused in front of an office door.

“You left your cell phone upstairs, right?” asked Grease. “No electronics.”

“I know that.”

“Just checking.”

He smiled, punching the combination into the lock.

“I heard somebody blew your cover,” Grease told Mara inside.

“You know who?”

“Obviously it was the Chinese. Question is how long they've known.”

Mara had been wondering that herself. It could very well have been back in Malaysia, given all that had gone down there. But there were also problems with the Hanoi station, and Mara strongly suspected a double agent there had passed along the information.

“You think this kills me?” she asked.

“Hell no. You know how many times the Russians figured out who I was? Five or six different incarnations. Nothing stops the Peter Principle,” Grease said. “You'll rise to your appropriate level of incompetence, I guarantee. You have a long way to go.”

Mara smiled.

“Speaking of Peter,” added Grease. “Before you go up to see him, there's a company I wanted to ask you about: Maccu Shang Shipping. A Philippine company. Sorry about the cramped space.”

The room was tiny, with a bare desk, a pair of computer terminals, and two steel-and-vinyl chairs. Mara and Grease were sitting almost knee to knee.

“I know Shang,” she told him. “The Philippines is a front. They're Chinese.”

“You're positive? The evidence looks a little ambiguous.”

“They're definitely Chinese.”

“Five ships leased to the company left Macau last night and headed for Zhanjiang. Southern China. Big navy port.”

“See?”

“Turns out some of our friends at the agency that doesn't exist happened to be tracking an army unit that was just sent there, real fast. Seems like they're in the port, waiting for something.”

The agency that doesn't exist was Grease's quaint way of referring to the NSA, or National Security Agency, which specialized in eavesdropping. His pseudonym came from a popular nickname for the agency, formed from its initials: No Such Agency.

“They're getting on the ships?” asked Mara.

“Don't know. I have to check back in. They may be there already. A lot of things to keep tabs on. That one just happened to catch my interest.”

“Shang Shipping brought all sorts of stuff into Malaysia,” said Mara. “A lot of different things.”

“Troops?”

Mara wasn't sure about that. The Chinese had smuggled some paramilitary and guerillas into the country as advisers, but most of their help to the rebels had been in the form of equipment. The ships had filed manifests that said they were shipping food to Burma—as unlikely an arrangement as Mara had ever heard of.

The Chinese unit's identity interested Grease—they were commandos, not regular army, and apparently not assigned to the amphibious assault that was to have been launched from Hainan.

“My question is where would they go?” said Grease.

“Could be anywhere,” said Mara. “Vietnam has a long coast.”

“The NSA suggested Hai Phong. Someone attached to the unit apparently gathered some sort of electronic information—I'm guessing that it had to do with a GPS system. But you know them. They won't admit they know anything.”

“Did they have assault ships?”

“No,” said Grease. “I'm wondering if they might just try sailing into the port.”

“Do the Vietnamese still hold Hai Phong?”

“They do. Were you there?”

“No, we didn't get that far west.”

Grease asked her a few more questions about the status of things in Vietnam. He commented that the country seemed surprisingly calm for one under siege. Mara wasn't so sure about that; in her experience, sanity and insanity mixed all the time.

“You going upstairs?” asked Grease, glancing at his watch.

“Yeah.”

“Well, come on. I'll escort you. We want to get up in time to see your boyfriend testify before the Senate.”

“My
boyfriend
?”

“Looks like I hit a nerve,” said Grease, opening the door. “I don't think I've ever seen that shade of red on you cheeks before.”

“Grease—”

“It does suit you.”

3

The Gulf of Tonkin

Commander Dirk Silas edged his finger
along the manual focus ring of his glasses, trying to will something out of the dark night before his ship. The moist air pulled a fog from the ocean, reducing the gear's effectiveness.

The Chinese were still there, six miles off the port bow. The frigate was the closer of the two; the cruiser's captain used the smaller boat as a shield and a prod, sending it close, only to have it tuck away. Right now it was doing the latter, sailing into what its captain probably supposed was safe murk beyond Silas's immediate vision.

Ha!

The communicator on the destroyer captain's belt buzzed and vibrated with an incoming message. The wireless system allowed Silas to communicate with all departments on his ship without having to be tethered to a physical control panel. He could switch from voice or text messaging by pressing a small button, changing channels and issuing simple commands such as “save” via voice.

In this case, the message referred him to a longer transmission from his fleet commander via video; he retreated to his cabin to view it.

Admiral Roy Meeve's stone countenance filled the screen. The message had been recorded; it wasn't live. The admiral's face seemed almost gray. That wasn't a function of the video mechanism—if anything it cast it a little more fleshlike.

“Dirk—we've confirmed now the Chinese have canceled their plan to ship the landing force from Hainan. Continue your patrol in the area. Maintain a course in international waters. Do not provoke or engage. Do not withdraw.”