Shadows of War

Xin chao!

Hello.

Vang.

Yes.

Toi khong hi?u.

I don’t understand.

He knew other words. What were they?

Grandfather — Ong. It was an honorific, a tide that the Vietnamese used all the time. It was like saying “sir.”

Other words.

Josh tried to stoke his memory, dredging up full phrases and sentences. Vietnamese had tones that went with the sounds, dramatically altering their meaning — a word could mean a ghost, or a rice plant, or a horse, depending on how it was pronounced.

Ngon. Very tasty. The food is very tasty. Can you call for help.

Can you call for help?

Cong an. Cong an.

Police.

Depending on whom he met, Vietnamese might be of little use. Most of the residents of the valley were Hmong natives, who didn’t speak much Vietnamese themselves. They were poor mountain people, still very close to their roots as nomadic, slash-and-burn farmers.

The trail looped back around the side of a hill, then continued through a patch of jungle. Josh walked steadily, sticking to the side of the trail so he could jump into the grass and hide if he heard anyone. As he turned a corner, he saw a cluster of thatch-roofed huts on the opposite slope. They were about a mile away, across a steep, rock-strewn ravine.

Josh ran his hand over the slight stubble of his morning beard. Would the people help him?

Yes, he decided. They must. They would. He began trotting down the path, trusting that it would curve back toward the hamlet.

6

Bangkok, Thailand

Mara Duncan was engulfed in a human tidal wave as she stepped out the side door of her apartment building, swept along on the sidewalk with literally hundreds of other Bangkok residents making their way to their morning posts. The entire city seemed to be flooding to work or school, and a good portion of the population seemed to be using the small side street where she lived.

It was always like this, not only here, but all through Bangkok and the close-in suburbs, where the population had gone from an unofficial fifteen million to nearly thirty million in less than a decade. Bangkok — known to most Thai-speaking locals as Krung Thep — was the unofficial poster city for the Third World’s population explosion. The streets were perpetually crowded and a thick shroud of pollution hung over the city. But it was a place of great wealth and commerce as well, a twenty-first-century boomtown that justifiably evoked comparisons to America’s Chicago or even New York in the early twentieth.

No fewer than five new skyscrapers were being built in the city; each was over one hundred stories tall. One of the buildings, Thai Wah V, was planned to top 45 5 meters — a height that would make it, not coincidentally, about a yardstick taller than Malaysia’s Petronas Towers I and II. The tower’s foundation was considered a modern engineering marvel, due to the wet ground that characterized so much of the city.

Mara glanced around as she joined the line to the escalators up to the skytrain. Bangkok was home to hundreds of spies from nearly every nation on earth, and it was not unusual for them to try to keep tabs on interesting Americans, whether they were known CIA officers or not. Two weeks before, Mara had been followed for several days, apparently by a Russian freelancer who bought her cover as a local sales rep for an American medical-equipment manufacturer and was trying to hunt up information for a Swiss firm. Either he’d lost interest or figured out who she really was; in any event, he’d disappeared without making an approach.

She missed him, in a way. He’d added a little spice to her mornings. Things had been dull since she’d come back from Malaysia.

The escalator moved swiftly. People stood only six or seven deep on the skytrain platform, a sign that there would be at least a five-minute wait for the next train. Mara wedged her way through the crowd, once again looking to make sure that she wasn’t being followed or observed.

The CIA’s Thailand bureau, traditionally one of the agency’s biggest in Asia, had grown exponentially over the past four years, and with space at the embassy at a premium, many of the officers worked in one of the “outbuildings” — secure suites rented by the CIA nearby. Mara’s office was in a building two blocks from the embassy; the agency leased five whole floors, but the offices were located in only two. While security was tight — the elevators had been rigged so that they couldn’t stop at the floor at all, and the stairwells were guarded by armed men — the “annex” had a much looser atmosphere than the embassy. The jokes were bawdier, and the coffee was better.

Or so the annex’s unofficial mayor claimed. He was in rare form when Mara arrived.

“You look just mah-valous,” Jesse DeBiase bellowed as she stepped out of the stairs. “Come taste some of the best joe this side of Seattle.”

“I don’t think I can drink another cup today,” said Mara.

“But dah-link, you must. Think of your fans.”

“All right, Million Dollar Man. If it’ll make you happy.”

DeBiase bowed. Just about everyone in the station called him Million Dollar Man, though most had no idea where he’d gotten the nickname. A few thought it was a reference to an op he’d run years before. In reality, he’d been awarded it decades before because his last name sounded the same as Ted DiBiase’s, a pro wrestler popular at the time. Why the CIA had ever hired a wrestling fan remained one of the agency’s most perplexing mysteries.

DeBiase was one of the deputy station chiefs, in title the annex supervisor, though he claimed his authority barely entitled him to order stationery. Mara had no idea what the Million Dollar Man did beyond telling stories to his officermates; he had never given her an assignment nor mentioned any of his. The latter might not have been particularly surprising, except that the Million Dollar Man talked so much about everything that it was hard to imagine that he would be able to resist at least hinting, indirectly, about things he had done in the distant if not recent past. But DeBiase never talked shop that way, and never seemed to have any appointments that had even the vaguest possible connection to espionage, real or potential. He was either very old-school about keeping secrets, or an officer who’d spent his career being promoted sideways and had never had anything real to do.

Probably the former, but you never could tell.

Today’s topic was his upcoming hernia operation, as yet unscheduled, but planned for the first week or maybe second after he returned to the States.

“Why not here?” asked Mara. Thailand had world-class medical care, and in fact many Americans flew there for so-called surgery vacations.

“No,” he said. “No. Some things — I was made in America. I’ll be fixed in America. So to speak.”

“So when are you going?” asked Mara.

“Soon,” said DeBiase. It was the same answer he’d given when they were introduced weeks before.

“What the hell’s keeping you here?” asked Tai Lai as he stirred creamer into his coffee. Alone among the annex denizens, Lai preferred powdered dairy substitute to the real milk and cream the Million Dollar Man managed to have delivered fresh twice a week. It couldn’t be for his health; Lai, who was on his second tour in Bangkok, stood about six feet and weighed all of 140. A good wind would push him over — though not break him, as he was a karate expert and in excellent shape.

Or so the certificates and trophies he kept in his office claimed.

“Duty, young Mr. Lai,” said the Million Dollar Man expansively. “The same thing that keeps us all here.