Edge of War

someone else to shoot.

Mara was furious with him, so angry that she was having a hard time keeping the car on the road.

“You okay back there?” she asked Josh.

He moaned an answer.

“Better stop soon,” suggested Squeaky.

Mara spotted a small dirt road on the left that led to an abandoned, ramshackle building. She braked and cranked the wheel hard to make the turn, skidding in the dirt. She pulled up in front of the building and hopped out, her gun in her hand.

Kerfer pulled in behind her.

“Why the hell did you do that?” she screamed at him.

“What do you think he was going to do when he found your gun in the handbag?” Kerfer said.

“I was bribing him,” said Mara. “That was his way of asking for more money. If it came to that, I would have told him we were armed because of the war. He wouldn’t have said anything. Except to ask for more money.”

“Right. You think twenty bucks gets you a get-out-of-jail-free card? You can’t corrupt everyone. You probably pissed him off by offering him the bribe.”

“His unit is probably following us.”

“It’ll take them a while to catch up,” said Kerfer. “They probably don’t even know what happened yet. The train sound covered the shots.”

“You’re a jackass, Lieutenant. You just killed seven of our allies.”

“If they’re allies, why the hell do we have to sneak out of their country?”

Mara stomped back to the car. Josh was bent over near the building. Squeaky and Little Joe were standing between him and the car, looking at her. She got behind the wheel. Squeaky got in the front, immediately pushing back the seat to try and get more legroom.

“Where we going?” he asked.

“South,” said Mara.

Josh, pale, got in the car. Little Joe pushed in beside him.

“It was a do-or-die thing,” said Squeaky. “Just a reaction. It’s how we’re trained.”

“I’m sure you’re very good at what you do,” said Mara. “But sometimes you have to take a risk.”

“The lieutenant lost some people in an extraction out of Afghanistan a year ago,” said the SEAL. “We were trying to get them out as civilians. Those were the orders. Taliban came up, disguised as policemen…”

Squeaky’s voice trailed off.

“This isn’t Afghanistan,” said Mara.

* * *

They drove with the windows down. Gradually, the fresh air helped clear Josh’s head.

At first, what had happened in the train car seemed far away, further than anything that had happened while he was near China, behind the advancing line of the Chinese. But gradually it came into sharper focus.

“How ya feeling?” asked Little Joe.

“A little better.”

“You looked like you were sleeping for a while.”

“Yeah, I guess I was.”

“You puked?”

“Only slime came out.” Josh wiped his mouth on his sleeve, the taste lingering in his mouth. “Why did the Vietnamese shoot at us?” he asked.

“‘They didn’t. We didn’t give them a chance.”

“Don’t they understand we’re on their side?” Josh asked.

“We’re not on anybody’s side but our own,” Little Joe told him.

“No, that’s not true. We have to — the whole world has to deal with this.”

“Dream on.”

* * *

Phai had arranged for Mara to get two vehicles in a small town southeast of Phu Xuyen. Besides the vehicles, Phai had arranged for some other supplies, including gas cans and water.

Mara debated whether it was worth the risk to cut back east. They needed cars or trucks, and holding on to these seemed far too risky. But going back in the direction of the army would be an even bigger risk.

Saigon — or Ho Chi Minh City, as it was officially but only occasionally called — lay over seven hundred miles away as the crow flew, and they weren’t crows. The twisted route and the Vietnamese highway system made the trip from Hanoi a twenty-hour marathon — if everything was with you. She’d calculated that it would take them close to two full days of driving.

Mara kept driving due south, following a checkerboard pattern of secondary roads through the farmland, staying as far away from settled areas as possible. After they’d gone about a half hour, she noticed Kerfer flashing his lights.

She pulled over to the side of the road.

“Gas is getting toward empty,” said the SEAL lieutenant.

As she started back for the car, she heard a pair of aircraft approaching. They were jets, low, very low.

Kerfer leapt out of the truck. “Out, get out!” he yelled. “Off the road.”

Josh and the others were already getting out, taking cover in the ditch at the side of the shoulder. The jets were over and gone before Mara reached them.

“J-12s,” said Stevens. “Brand-new. Chinese stealth jets.”

“That was a big bomb they were carrying,” said Josh.

“That’s a fuel tank under the belly,” said Stevens. “Gives them more distance. Except that it’s a bad sign — means they’re not scared of Vietnamese radar anymore. Probably blew it all up in the first hour of the war.”

“Hey, pilot wannabe,” said Kerfer, “you figure they’re doing recce?”

“Probably testing defenses,” said Stevens. “Or just trying to see what the Vietnamese got left. They’ll be using UAVs for reconnaissance.”

“Kerfer, you take the car,” said Mara. “And the girl. Josh and I will get the gas. Just us two.”

“No way. You need protection,” said Kerfer.

“Protection?”

“Don’t be foolish.”

“One person with us in the cab,” she said, realizing he was right. “It looks too suspicious in the back.”

“The hell with suspicious. These people are at war, spook girl. You think they’re really putting a lot of thought into anything but saving their own asses?”

Mara was insistent. She told Kerfer to follow her; when they came to a gas station, she would go in; he should drive on and wait a short distance away.

“You ain’t gonna run out on me, right?” said Kerfer, finally agreeing.

“I’m tempted,” she said.

* * *

The pumps at the gas station looked like the ones back home, more or less, with bright fluorescents and an illuminated sign announcing petro. A silver-haired man dressed in a white shirt and black pants came out of the cement-block building beyond the pumps. He walked with a limp that tilted him almost sideways, dragging his right foot across the crumbling macadam.

Mara and Squeaky both got out, leaving Josh alone in the truck.

The contrast between the calm if rundown station and what had happened in the railroad car — not to mention the past few days — was stark. The station belonged to a world that had never known war, and didn’t have much use for the rest of the world, either. A cluster of buildings sat just beyond it, spilling off the roadside into the farmland beyond. They were small, mostly made of block like the gas station, with shed roofs of metal in various stages of rust and disintegration. The ones closer to the road were stores as well as houses, and Josh could see people sitting or squatting on the stoops in front of them. A boy of about eight stared at the truck intently, perhaps thinking of what he would do if he had such a thing.

Mara spoke to the gas station owner as he filled the truck’s tank. She seemed to be doing most of the