Shadows of War

* * *

Lucas rubbed his eyes as he looked at the map, pinpointing Josh MacArthur’s location with the help of the data DeBiase had gotten from the satellite. It was about ten kilometers from the science camp, very close to the Chinese border.

Very, very close.

Where was Mara?

Eighty-five kilometers away.

Far, even if the country wasn’t at war. And she’d have to cross into the area under Chinese control.

He couldn’t send just her. He’d need more people, a full team.

The hostage rescue unit. Or SEAL Team 2.

Either way, he needed his boss to sign off. But he would. This was big — a video of atrocities, an eyewitness.

“Josh, are you still with me?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m here.”

“I need you to — ” Lucas stopped short. He was on an open line; he couldn’t say anything.

Probably the Chinese weren’t listening. They had so much else to do.

“What do you need?” asked Josh.

“I need you to… I need you to hide for a while.”

“I am hiding. When are you going to get me?”

“Can we play it by ear?” Lucas asked. “I have a few — ”

“No. I want to get out of here.”

“We’ll get you out.” Lucas winced, remembering he’d said the same thing to Mara a short while before. “I just need time to work out the details.”

“How long?”

“It will take a while. At least a day.”

“A day?”

“Maybe even longer.” He had to be honest. “A few days. Can you make it?”

Josh didn’t answer at first. When he did, he sounded resigned. Not distraught, just resigned. “I can last a few days. Longer if I have to.”

“Just a few days. I’ll call you back.”

“When?”

Lucas bit his lip, trying to think what to say, and worried that he had already given away too much. He didn’t want to make it obvious that he knew the Chinese were blocking calls. He also didn’t want to give a specific time, which would make it easier to intercept his transmission.

Or even jam it, if they figured out how he was able to get around their gear.

“I’m moving around,” he told Josh finally. “I’m hard to get. But I can call you. At noon, I’ll call you.”

“Noon tomorrow?”

“Yes. Can you make it until then?”

“Of course.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“All right then,” said Lucas. “I’m going to hang up.”

But Josh MacArthur had already killed the line.

13

Washington, D.C.

President Greene began swinging back and forth ever so slightly in the chair, a nervous habit he had picked up as a young pilot. If he cared to, he could probably have recalled the exact moment it started — a preflight briefing before a bombing mission up the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The irony would have struck him as extremely amusing — but this was not a moment for either irony or amusement.

“The Vietnamese aren’t saying anything officially.” Secretary of State Knox paused to rub his chin. He seemed genuinely insulted by the Vietnamese government’s reluctance to acknowledge they were in very deep trouble. “It’s possible that they simply don’t understand what’s going on. It’s all moving very quickly. Very quickly.”

“They’ve put troops in Lang Son, Bac Giang, and Quang Ninh provinces on alert in the last hour,” said Walter Jackson, the national security director. “They appear to believe the main thrust will come from the northeast.”

“Don’t you?” asked Knox.

“No. Admittedly they have troops there. But my Southeastern Asian expert thinks this is their main attack. The intelligence is still inconclusive.”

“There are a hell of a lot of troops in southeast China,” said Knox. “More than three times what Vietnam can field in the region. And they’ve made a show of moving there over the past several hours.”

“Exactly,” said Jackson. “They want them to be seen.”

“The units in that area are all undermanned,” said Frost, the CIA director. “And there’s no armor to speak of.”

“They attacked sooner than we thought,” said Knox. “And they’re moving faster. Frankly, we’ve been underestimating them.”

You have, thought Greene. The rest of us haven’t. I haven’t.

Greene’s thoughts flew back to his year in the Vietnamese POW camp, and then to the day of his release at the very end of the war. He could feel the hot tears that welled in his eyes — the first tears that he’d cried since the early days of torture. Tears of relief — and the vow that he would one day get revenge.

This was his opportunity, wasn’t it? Yet his duty demanded precisely the opposite.

Irony.

“Will they let us help them?” Greene said abruptly, turning to the secretary of state.

“I honestly don’t know,” said Knox.

“What did you have in mind?” asked Jackson.

“Intelligence for starters,” said the president. “Let them at least know what they’re dealing with.”

Greene rose. He had too much energy, physical as well as mental, to stay still when considering a problem. “We can’t just let the Chinese roll through Vietnam,” he added.

“Putting American troops into Vietnam — even I know that’s political suicide,” said Knox.

“We’d never get anything there beyond a token force anyway,” admitted Jackson. “And that’s if the Vietnamese even accepted our help.”

But the problem wasn’t Vietnam, it was China. Greene had known for years this day would come: the moment when China decided it no longer needed to play by the rest of the world’s rules. He hated parallels to the past, and was especially wary of comparisons to the years before World War II — they were too easy, too glib.

But if ever a situation looked like a replay of Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, this was it.

Or maybe the annexation of Austria. At least Czechoslovakia had generated some outrage. Early indications were that this would barely draw a yawn at the UN.

And forget about the American public’s reaction.

“We can’t just let the Chinese roll through Vietnam,” insisted Greene. “They must be stopped.”

“A weak show of force would be worse than no show of force,” said Jackson. “I agree with the Chiefs on that.”

“We could talk to the Vietnamese under the guise of preparing the protest to the UN,” said the secretary of state. “And give them intelligence that way.”

“Good,” said Greene. “That’s a start.”