“I don’t know. I will get you. You can count on that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s not like Malaysia. I’m
“Hey, boss, I never said you were. And as far as Croton goes — we all work with what we got, right?”
“Mara, I promise — ”
“I’m worried about the phone’s battery, boss. I’ll sign back on at 0600 tomorrow. Sayonara until then.”
“How’d she take it?” asked Hammer.
“About what I expected.”
“She’s going to stay put?”
“Probably,” said Lucas.
“If she can get down to Saigon, she can get out,” said Hammer. “Even Hanoi.”
“She’s okay where she is for now. Farther south, she may run into the Chinese. Until we know exactly where they’re going, I can’t tell her to leave. I may be sending her right into a trap.”
“She’s in one already if they send more troops through Lao Cai.”
“Hey, Peter, you may want to look at this NSA summary,” said Gina DiMarco, who was monitoring the National Security bulletins at a nearby workstation. Gina was a cryptography clerk Lucas had pressed into service to help keep up with the data flow.
“What am I looking at?” he asked, dropping down to one knee to look at her screen.
“The Chinese started selectively blocking satellite phone communications from the area satellite phone services a few hours ago. AsiaSat2, Iridium — they’ve all been hit. The system is pretty sophisticated — there’s technical information on what exactly they’re doing back in this tab here.”
She rolled the cursor up and tapped one of the windows. A screen dense with words appeared.
“Do I need to know how this all works?” Lucas asked.
“No,” she said, clearly disappointed.
A strong scent stung Lucas’s nose.
“What’d you have for dinner?” he asked.
“It’s sharp, Gina.”
“Sorry, boss. About an hour ago, a member of a UN science team tried calling out on the emergency line. The Chinese blocked the other side of the transmission shortly after it began. Then they blocked it completely, but he still continued to talk.”
“He didn’t realize it was blocked?”
“Apparently you can only tell that you don’t hear someone responding.”
“They can do that?”
“They’re using a type of ferret satellite.” Gina rolled the cursor arrow back toward the window with the technical data. “It’s kind of fascinating. They lock onto the bands the commercial satellite is using, and then selectively — ”
“You can explain it to me when we’re past all this,” Lucas said, starting to read the transcript.
10
After being transported into the area with the main force, the commandos would leapfrog the defenses, sabotaging telephone and electric lines as they proceeded to a point southwest of the city where Highways 12 and 6 split. They would secure a small culvert bridge on Route 12 just south of that intersection, holding it to cut off any retreat by the Vietnamese.
The plan called for them to meet with three platoons of paratroopers, who were to have landed about five kilometers south and proceeded north along the highway. Because of the paratroopers — together the force amounted to about a hundred men — Jing Yo had been given only one of his squads, amounting to eight men, not counting him. The other was assigned to provide protection at the force headquarters, basically operating as bodyguards for Colonel Sun, who was traveling with the main body.
Jing Yo hadn’t protested when the orders were first drawn up; the paratroopers were well trained, and the force was more than sufficient to hold the bridge. But while racing to rejoin the tanks, the paratroopers had not been able to take off due to problems with their aircraft. That meant he and his eight men, initially assigned as little more than advance scouts, were now expected to do the work of one hundred.
Colonel Sun, of course, had not mentioned any of this when ordering him to rejoin the force. Jing Yo could only wonder if the colonel was purposely sabotaging him with an eye toward taking him down a peg or two.
Or maybe he was hoping he’d be killed when his unit was overrun.
Getting south past the column of rapidly advancing armor and trucks on the narrow Vietnamese highways wasn’t easy. In many cases the two lanes of Chinese traffic completely blocked the road, including the narrow shoulder. So by the time Jing Yo managed to meet up with the vanguard of the assault, they were almost within sight of the barracks’ perimeter. The infantry troops riding with the tanks had already dismounted, preparing for the attack.
“Through the field, quickly,” Jing Yo told Private Ai Gua, who was driving.
They veered across the ditch that ran along the highway. The land, tropical forest only a few years before, had been plowed under and turned into a wheat field. It was fallow at the moment; the season’s planting wouldn’t take place for another few months.
While the moon was very strong, it was difficult to see obstructions in the field without turning their headlights on. Twice Ai Gua barely missed large rocks. When he came to what looked like a path between the fields but turned out to be an irrigation ditch, he was going too fast to stop in time. He tried plunging across. He made it to the other side of the embankment, but then stalled the engine. Jing Yo leapt from the cab and ran to the back, where Sergeant Wu was already mustering the men in an attempt to push the vehicle forward.
There was only a small trickle of water in the bottom of the ditch, but its shallow sides were soft mud, and it took several minutes before the truck’s wheels finally caught enough hard earth to move forward. Ai Gua revved the engine, spattering mud over everyone, including Jing Yo, as he made it back onto solid ground.
“Let’s go!” yelled the lieutenant, racing back to the cab.
He heard gunshots in the distance, the low crack of rifle fire. The assault had already begun.
“Turn on the headlights,” he told Ai Gua. “Let’s go.”
Fifty meters farther on, they came to a dirt road that led back in the direction of the highway. They turned onto it, Ai Gua stomping the gas pedal for all he was worth. But the lane soon angled southward, away from the highway.
“We need to go west,” Jing Yo told Ai Gua. “Cut across the field.”
The private did as he was told. The vehicle jerked unevenly, climbing in the direction of the highway.
“Another ditch ahead, Lieutenant,” said Ai Gua.
“Try south. Turn left.”
They did, but it was obvious that the ditch blocking their way wasn’t going to end anytime soon. Jing Yo checked his GPS. According to the device, the nearest road back to the highway was two kilometers farther south.
“Stop here,” he told Ai Gua. He jerked open the door and ran to the back. “Take as much ammunition as you can,” he told his squad. “Leave the rucks. Let’s go, let’s go — we run from here.”
Sergeant Wu began mustering the men. Jing Yo told Ai Gua to take the truck alone, find the road, and come
