He saw the surprise on the man’s face, then the little geysers of dust rising from the rock next to the soldier, then from the soldier himself.
Gray dust from the rock. Red from the soldier.
The man looked up into his face and started to say something, his chubby lips opening into a question. Then he fell back into the dried streambed.
Josh ran to him, and stared down at his face. There was no expression on it now, just a kind of numb emptiness, the eyes staring without comprehension.
The man had had a satellite phone in his hand. As he picked it up, Josh realized it was an AsiaSat2 unit, the same type that the expedition had used.
Josh’s anger erupted. He went back to the body and stomped on the dead man’s face with his heel, fury unleashed in a violent surge that left him physically drained after only a few seconds. Still he kept stomping, kicking the man for what seemed like hours.
When he stopped, he didn’t feel any pleasure; he felt no satisfaction or even justification. He felt only trembling exhaustion.
The gunshot would have been heard for several miles, and others would be reacting. He wasn’t going to be lucky like he had been before. This man had an insignia — he was an officer. People would care about him. They would look for him, and want revenge.
Josh had to get out of here —
He bent down to see if the man had anything useful. There was a pistol on his belt, and a canteen — Josh jerked the canteen free and drained about a quarter of it in a single gulp. Coughing, he stopped and caught his breath, then took another drink, slower, more measured — the water had a metal taste, though not nearly bad enough to make him spit it out.
Capping the steel bottle, he stood silently for a moment, listening.
There was nothing. It was as if he and the Chinese soldier had been the only two people in the world, and now it was just him.
A dangerous illusion. They would be running to see what the shots were. He had to get as far away from here as he could. Then he could use the phone to call for help.
Josh put the water bottle in his left pocket, then hiked his jeans and tucked the pistol into the front of his waistband. Glancing at his battered boots, he started climbing back over the ridge, rifle ready.
7
An admiral from PACOM spoke next, saying that the Navy had no ships closer than a full day’s sail from the coast of Vietnam, and it would take several days to get anything bigger than a destroyer there. A P-3 Orion had been scrambled to cover the coast, looking for Chinese submarines, but at the moment that was the extent of the Navy’s effort in the area. If American citizens were going to be evacuated from Vietnam —
“My God, we don’t want photos like that,” blurted Harold Park. As the CIAs director of operations or DDO, he was the number two man in the agency. He was a good DDO, and an even better agency politician.
Which was good for Lucas, unless he somehow ended up as designated scapegoat if things went terribly wrong.
People escaping from the roof of the U.S. embassy would qualify. But so would a lot of other things — most of which they probably couldn’t think of.
“At the rate the Chinese are moving, they’ll reach Lai Chau by nightfall,” said Sara Mai, the deputy national security director for South Asia. She was speaking from a plane, and while the connection was clear, there was a low hum whenever she spoke, the noise-canceling gear not quite successful in cutting out the sound of the engines.
“That’s if they don’t turn east and go to the river,” said the chief of staff, Army General Clayton Fisk. “Which they can also reach by then.”
“We don’t believe they’ll turn east,” said Mai.
“Really? You have data to back that up?”
“We’re working on a theory — ”
“Data,” repeated Fisk, using the tone he would have used to browbeat an underling. Lucas always pictured Fisk chewing on a cigar — he had the jowls of a bulldog, and that pretty much described his manner.
“We’re looking at the same intelligence you are,” answered Mai sharply.
Walter Jackson, the national security adviser and Mai’s boss, stepped in to quash the argument before it started.
“Tom, do you have anything new for us?” he said, talking to Thomas Mengzi, the deputy head of the CIA’s Chinese station. Mengzi was sitting in for Michael Dalton, who’d flown to Russia two days before and was still in Moscow.
“Just more of what I said at the top,” Mengzi told Jackson. “The Chinese say they were attacked. They claim there’s plenty of evidence. Rumor has it we caught it on satellite.”
“We do have some images,” said the Air Force analyst. “There were troop trucks. Hard to tell at this moment if they were Vietnamese, though they seem to have come out of the country.”
Has to be a setup, thought Lucas, though he didn’t say it.
“All right. Thank you all for the update,” said Jackson, who as national security adviser had chaired the session. “We’ll reconvene for a fresh update at 2100 Washington time.”
Lucas stayed on the line, waiting for Park to come back.
“You wanted a word, Peter?” asked the DDO, his face flashing on the screen. Either the camera or the technology subtly altered the shape of his face, making it even rounder than it was in person.
“One of my people was in a plane that was shot at by the Chinese air force and forced to land,” said Lucas. “She’s okay. But she’s stranded up near the border.”
“I see.”
“I’d like to take her out.”
“How?”
“I haven’t settled on the exact plan.”
“She? Who is it?”
“Mara Duncan. The PM who was reassigned out of Malaysia. I needed someone clean to contact our Belgian friend. He didn’t show. She went looking for him.”
“The wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I guess it depends on your perspective. She’s the one that first told us the Chinese were definitely over the border. Her information came at least an hour before the satellites picked anything up.”
Park wasn’t impressed. “Where exactly is she?”
“Nam Det. We ran that operation into Xin Jie, China, from there a few months ago.”
Park nodded but said nothing.
“I’m pretty confident we can get an airplane onto the field,” said Lucas when the silence grew too long.
“Not under these circumstances.”
“I can’t leave her there.”
Park didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“All right,” said Lucas finally. “That’s all I have right now.”
The screen blanked. Lucas took a swig from his water, then unlocked the door and went outside to the small
