South China Sea

right.” The next instant, he slid back down her breasts, her body, and buried his head between her legs, his tongue darting hungrily like a lizard’s inside her, his hands bunching the sheets up beneath her to get her higher. Now he began licking her, his slurping noises like a cow with a salt lick. He stopped his breathing short, excited. “You like that, babe?”

She knew yes was the answer he wanted, but he liked her to pause a moment as if teasing him.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s beautiful. Don’t stop.”

“Love — you, babe — I—” He couldn’t say all the words, he was so aroused. Panting, he raised himself onto his elbows, his head sinking beneath her shoulders like a wildebeest at water. “Know what — I’m gonna do now?”

“Yes,” she said. Oh God, she’d made a mistake, but before she could recant, he was raging at her. “You stupid bitch! What do I pay you for, eh? What—”

“No,” she said quickly. “No, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what I pay you for?”

“No, no,” she said frantically. “I mean I don’t know what you’re going to do to me.”

“Ah…” He was on his feet, his tumescence already subsiding. She’d fucked up the script. It had to be perfect— goddamn it.

“You stupid bitch — go on, get! Into the fucking shower, you — incompetent whore!”

Mi Yin let the shower cascade over her, cleansing her, out of his grip for a few precious moments. The things she did for Beijing. She’d had enough. If she didn’t find out whether he was faking the well surveys, she’d tell Beijing he was anyway. The risk was they might want to see an original forged chart from which he’d made copies and on which potentially rich oil finds were hidden. It was a risk either way, but better be in the bad books with the party than stay any longer with this pig.

She could see him naked through the curved, bubbled, and transparent glass wall of the shower. She saw his hand on the handle, and so she quickly turned off the shower. “Turn it back on!” he commanded her. With the water falling on both of them, he pushed her against the glass-bubbled wall, and she stiffened as she felt him rubbing the bar of soap between her buttocks. He was hard again, pushing into her rectum.

“You like this, babe?”

“Yes.”

“You want it deep?”

She hesitated.

“You want it deep?”

“To split me,” she said.

“Atta girl.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Chong rode the subway for the next two hours. Perhaps he could send the message to Pyongyang immediately on his own recognizance, assuming the rumor to be true. But his training told him otherwise. Like a good newspaper reporter, he had always operated by confirming such a rumor on the basis of two independent sources. And so, as he sat in the subways, his face covered by the pages of the Asahi Shinbun, the subterranean reflections flashing past him like memories of another life, he waited until eleven- thirty before he called the two agents.

One, an English speaker, was watching CNN’s transworld service. The other had already unrolled his bed mat when the phone rang. But both told him the rumor was correct, that Freeman had had large numbers of American soldiers, stationed in Japan, called to give blood for the USVUN hospital ship USS Tampa heading for the Gulf of Tonkin. This was normal in such war situations, but the Tampa had taken unusually large amounts of Rh-negative blood aboard. Chong again called the first agent, and worked the phrase “inclement weather” into his dialogue, an instruction to the agent to forward the information immediately to Pyongyang. In turn, Pyongyang sent a most secret, class one, number-for-word, onetime pad message to its embassy in Beijing.

There is no Rh-negative blood in China. If the American general was storing it up aboard Tampa, it could mean only one thing: he was prepared to strike deep into China proper.

North Korea secretly but immediately pledged troops to help China if this eventuality arose, knowing that China already had enough, with a professional army of over two million. The gesture from Pyongyang, however, would be greatly appreciated and might well secure what North Korea, after her forced agreements with the U.S., needed, or rather wanted, most: to have China share as much as possible nuclear technology and/or weapons with North Korea.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

A mile south of Ningming, the barbed-wire enclosure Mellin and the other POWs had landed near was about two hundred yards long by one hundred yards wide. Rolls of German concertina razor wire formed another, inner perimeter five feet in from the outer rectangle. There were no buildings or tents, only ten-foot-high hills of cement bricks beneath blue plastic covers about a hundred feet apart, and between them a dozen or so pallets of bamboo either lashed or nailed together — it was difficult to tell from a distance — to look like long, fifty-by-twenty-foot rafts.

“Don’t like the look of this,” Murphy said. “No bloody cover. What if it starts pissing rain?”

“You’ll get wet,” Shirley answered.

“Yeah,” Murphy responded. “So will you, luv.”

“Don’t call me luv.”

“Sorry, Shirl.”

“And don’t—” She stopped. Upshut was looking their way. Danny Mellin noticed that the big barbed-wire enclosure to which they were being directed had been erected on higher ground above the marsh, and he commented to no one in particular among his fellow POWs that “we’re going to have to build our own accommodation. Sooner we do, sooner we’ll get cover.”

“I suppose now we’re bloody hostages for that friggin’ strip,” Murphy said, nodding north toward the airfield.

“Yes,” Mellin answered. “Well, let’s try to get along with them, Mike. Okay?”

“You serious? Listen, mate, if you think I’m going to cooperate with this fucking—”

“Lower your voice,” Mellin said sharply. The helos were taking off. He added softly, “No point in getting them riled up for nothing. B’sides, I don’t see we’ve got much option. They’ve got all the guns.”

“Yeah,” Murphy answered. “But we don’t have to bloody well kowtow to—”

“Be quiet.” It was Shirley, indicating Upshut and several other guards coming their way, dividing the POWs into squads of ten prisoners each. Suddenly the sun was swallowed by cloud, and the marshlands, the higher ground, and the airfield were cast in a depressing gray metallic light that took the sheen of the long elephant grass. It made the airfield, now caught in a shower of rain, look farther away than it really was.

A dark column of three-ton, khaki-painted trucks was coming from the airfield. When it pulled up at the edge of the marsh about three hundred yards from the POWs, an officer alighted from one of the trucks with a PLA flunky a pace behind carrying what looked like a soapbox, but which in fact was a depleted ammunition box of sturdy construction.

The major waited for the flunky to put down the box, then mounted it as if he were Alexander the Great. Though somewhat dated in his phraseology, his English was near perfect. “I am Major Chen. You are prisoners of the People’s Liberation Army.”

“No shit!” Murphy murmured.

“You are here to work. First you will be so good as to construct your accommodation. Thirty bodies will be in