South China Sea

“Piece of cake,” he said, and gave her a smile she couldn’t see in the dark.

As she left, he berated himself for such an adolescent moment. But damn it, he hadn’t had a woman for — he couldn’t remember. And probably neither had young Boyd. It was ever a mystery why some men got hit and others didn’t. Freeman had never believed it had anything to do with God. It was a matter of pure luck and something he called survival know-how, which had to do with knowing what to do in the absence of luck.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

As Jae Chong staggered out of the karaoke club into Tokyo’s Ginza district, the forest of neons became a blur of light, the cold night air that made his nose run doing nothing to sober him up as he made his way, smiling, through the crowds, which dutifully ignored him.

Ironically, it was the fact that he was drunk that allowed him to go unnoticed, as Japanese in general, while disapproving, were used to the outflow of drunks in the all-but-mandatory swill that up- and-coming young male executives took part in with their bosses after the working day. Chong, though he knew perfectly well he was drunk and had difficulty even reaching in his pocket for tissues, felt invulnerable. If any Japanese dare fix him with a disapproving stare, he was ready to stare back and stare them down. To hell with the lot of them. They had never conceded that the Second World War was their doing in the Pacific, all their revisionist historians busy writing tracts about how Japan was a victim. What they did in Korea was unspeakable. They deserved the atom bomb, and now the Americans were their friends. Well, sort of. Damn them all, the Japanese and the Americans and—

A policeman approached him, but Chong’s air of confidence stayed with him, there being no discernible difference in his pace or manner. The policeman pointed at the pavement behind Chong. “You dropped your keys.”

“What?” Chong said. Usually when they saw Koreans, they wanted to see ID. “Oh,” Chong said. “Thank you,” and he bowed before he bent down to retrieve the keys and two or three tissues that he’d dropped, wondering as he did so how it was that facial tissues always ended up in tight little balls in your pocket, and knowing instinctively that the cop was going to recognize him before they got much farther apart.

The air of confidence he’d had evaporated suddenly, and he turned right, into the first alley he saw, and ran down the dimly lit canyon. He turned right once more, stopping, slamming himself back hard against a cold brick wall, panting, fighting hard to slow down his heart, which was banging inside his chest so loudly he was afraid someone would hear it.

It was only a second later that Chong heard the whistle and the cop running. But would the cop turn into his ill-lit alley, or into the one on the left? He could hear the policeman stopping momentarily, could hear him breathing — or was it his own breath? Then the cop started running again. Chong saw the policeman’s shadow the moment he turned right. He leapt forward then, and stuck the knife in the cop’s heart. He wrenched it out, the policeman sliding down, his eyes bulging, his left hand clawing in the dim-lit air, his right trying futilely to grab the brick wall. Chong stabbed him again, leaving the knife embedded deeply in his chest.

Chong was half running, half walking, attempting to slow down his excitement. Plunging the blade into one of his persecutors had been one of the most satisfying things he’d done in a long time. But with it came fear too, gobbling up his earlier confidence, and he was afraid that when he hit the stream of pedestrians and late-night shoppers, he would have that hunted look that hunters so easily spot.

Relax, he told himself. Breathe the air deep into your stomach. That’s it. No, don’t force a smile or even a grin. Try to adopt that slouched, anonymous, expressionless look — meld into the crowd. Now he had two phone calls to make to confirm a rumor he had heard from the third agent in his political cell, the second agent having been Tazuko Komura, who had been killed along with all her other victims on the bullet train. The rumor he’d heard concerned the loading of supplies aboard the U.S. hospital ship, the SS Tampa— specifically, blood supply.

It was a common enough guide to impending war for a country’s intelligence community, especially NATO and the Warsaw Pact, to keep tabs on such things as the movements of VIPs in departments of defense and associated industries and on the present state of blood supplies, any sudden increase of plasma and blood supplies a sign that hostilities were about to take place. In the case of the SS Tampa, it was only natural that blood supplies would have been maximized before she had set sail for the South China Sea to serve as USVUN’s hospital, but Chong had wanted more telling information. Though he’d intended to make the two calls in the morning, after he had sobered up, the fright of his knowing that the death of the policeman, in addition to the JDF agents and the American he had killed, would be sparking the biggest manhunt in Tokyo’s history quickly persuaded him to risk using a public phone booth to make the confirmation calls under the guise of being a furnace salesman.

The first number rang until the message machine came on. Chong hung up, watching the reflections in the Perspex bubble of the phone booth. When he dialed the second number, one of the man’s children answered. No, her father wasn’t at home. Could she take a message?

“No, thank you,” Chong replied and hung up, conscious of two things simultaneously: that he was starting to get a pounding headache and that someone was standing behind him. He whirled about, only to frighten a teenage schoolgirl who stepped back a few paces and stared at him. He mumbled an apology and walked off, joining the crowd, where he became aware of people now looking at him, glancing down at his trousers. Holding his aching head, his gaze followed theirs and he saw a long streak of blood from his crotch to the knee of his right trouser leg. “Shit!” he groaned, and kept his eyes open for a drugstore. There, he took a plastic shopping bag to try to hide the blood, bought a package of acetaminophen gel capsules, and went over to the store’s fridge for a guava juice. The druggist had a good look at him, and when Chong left the store, rang the police.

* * *

The censors in General Jorgensen’s HQ in Hanoi knew they couldn’t stop the story of the MIAs getting out, but they tried, under Jorgensen’s instructions, in “the interests of security,” by which Jorgensen meant in the interests of the Pentagon MIA and POW office, to limit the damage. Jorgensen insisted that from CNN Center in Atlanta the satellite feed, sped all over the world to millions of viewers, would consist of a two-part story: first, that turncoat American MIAs from the Vietnam War had “reportedly” been sighted in Vietnam’s central highlands; second, that a column of fifty to one hundred Khmer Rouge had “reportedly” crossed the Vietnamese-Laotian border. In this way, Jorgensen hoped that in the viewer’s mind the renegade MIA story would be connected with the Khmer Rouge, so that any public demand to have the MIAs found would not automatically become a call to commit U.S. forces to fighting the Khmer Rouge — with whom the Pentagon had no intention of closing.

But Jorgensen had been too clever by half, as American viewers coast to coast were jamming Washington’s and CNN’s fax lines, clamoring for the return of the MIAs immediately, because if they had been turncoats in ‘Nam, weren’t they now “allies” with the U.S. against China? The spirit of forgiveness was across the land and the call was, “Bring ‘em home.”

It didn’t occur to anyone except Freeman, Marte Price, and a few others on the spot that “Salt and Pepper Two” might not want to go home. But Freeman didn’t care. In a roundabout and unpredictable way, Marte Price’s report had done what Freeman had hoped for. It galvanized U.S. public opinion to send in U.S. troops if necessary to bring out those two MIAs and the others the Vietnamese would now be hopefully willing to release — if they wanted to count on continued USVUN assistance in repelling the Chinese invasion.

Freeman immediately requested and received, albeit reluctantly, permission from Jorgensen to send in an “MIA reconnaissance force,” but Jorgensen insisted that Freeman change the name from “Operation Eagle” to “Operation Homecoming.”

“I don’t give a damn what it’s called,” Freeman said on receiving Jorgensen’s instruction. “It’ll be carried out by a Special Forces task force of about a hundred men, assorted USVUN commandos chosen mainly from the U.S. Delta, British SAS, and the British Gurkha regiment.”

“I thought you’d only need ten men,” Jorgensen countered on the secure phone, the explosions of U.S. TACAIR from the carrier and Chinese triple A in the background making it difficult for Freeman to hear the commander. Jorgensen waited for a lull in the bombing. There was none and so he shouted again, asking why Freeman was sending in so many men.