Edge of War

“If I hadn’t we’d be dead by now,” he told her, walking back to the car.

* * *

Mara let Squeaky drive as they pressed south. The patrols seemed almost nonexistent. DeBiase was cagey in his updates, not giving her exact information about what was going on. That made sense, of course: if she was captured, anything he told her would have to be considered forfeit to the Chinese. Knowing what the Americans knew and when they knew it would tell them quite a bit about the intelligence-gathering methods.

Josh was still sleeping in the middle seat of the truck next to her. He began mumbling to himself incoherently, humming almost, his teeth held close together.

Bad dream, probably. Maybe based on what he had seen behind the lines.

He’d told her very little of it. An entire village buried in a field. An arm poking up from the ground after the rain. His fellow scientists, murdered in their sleep. The body of child who’d crawled under a bed to hide after being wounded, then left there to die, its toy doll in its arms.

The sat phone rang. DeBiase with another update.

“Hey, darling, how are you?”

“I’m doing good, Million Dollar Man,” Mara answered. “How’s your hernia?”

“Ailing me greatly. You’re not making very good time.”

“We’re driving through a country that has a war on,” said Mara. “I didn’t know you had your stopwatch out.”

“Listen, the Chinese navy is gathering off the coast, south of Hainan Island. There’s big trouble brewing.”

“You told me that already.”

“This is big trouble. It looks like they have an invasion force getting ready.”

“When?”

“Can’t tell. But we want you home. Come on now,” he said, switching to his cheerleader voice. “Pick up your pace. Once you get below Hue, you’ll have free sailing. I have a plane lined up for you in Saigon.”

“There has to be an airstrip closer that we can get to,” Mara told him. “Come on.”

“Darlin’, I’ve been trying. But the best alternative I can do to Ho Chi Minh is a puddle jumper that can meet you near Cambodia. That’ll be twice as dangerous. The Chinese have complete air superiority, as you just saw.”

“And the pilot’s a drunk, right?”

“Could well be.”

It was an inside joke between them, a reference to a story DeBiase liked to tell of one of his own hairy escapes by plane, when the pilot had been so smashed that DeBiase had taken over the controls mid-flight. DeBiase, of course, had no clue what he was doing and just barely succeeded in keeping the plane moving in the right direction. Miraculously, the real pilot revived about ten minutes from the airfield where they were supposed to touch down, and landed the plane without a hitch. The story was probably largely apocryphal, like many a DeBiase tale, but it was told with such gusto that it deserved to be entirely true.

“If you start to get into trouble south of Hue,” added DeBiase, “we’ll consider asking the Vietnamese for help. The closer we are to Saigon, the harder it should be for the Chinese to interfere.”

“I don’t think asking the Vietnamese for help at this point is a good idea,” said Mara.

“Why not?”

“There have to be more spies in Saigon than in Hanoi,” she said.

“I’m sure there are. What else is up?” asked DeBiase. His voice had a subtle edge to it.

“We had some trouble on the train,” said Mara, deciding to come clean. “With the Vietnamese.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The kind that got them killed.”

“That sounds like bad trouble,” said DeBiase.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen good trouble.”

“Well.” He paused. She knew he was considering whether to ask what had happened. “To make an omelet, eggs are often broken.”

“They are.”

“We won’t talk to the Vietnamese at all,” he said.

“Good.”

“But you get going. Things are falling apart there damn fast.”

20

Washington, D.C.

The thing that really frosted Greene was the fact that all of the senators he’d invited to lunch in the White House dining room were members of his own party. All had stood onstage with him this past November and proclaimed their undying support. They’d been the first on their feet in January to applaud at the inauguration.

And the first with their hands out the next day.

He didn’t have one vote among them to give aid to Vietnam. Maybe he had Leiber. Maybe. But even the Connecticut senator looked like he was a little beaten down. He sat at the far end of the table near the windows and the painting of Geronimo that Greene liked, hunched over a bowl of soup. He’d said less than two words the entire time.

“So obviously we’re here for a reason, Mr. President,” said Phillip Grasso, whom Greene had seated at his right hand. “You’re going to push us on China.”

“Damn right I’m going to push you on China,” said Greene.

“They’re taking over the world again, right?” Grasso turned and winked at the other senators.

“I wouldn’t underestimate their threat,” said Greene.

“I take China very seriously,” said Grasso. “I just don’t think we should go to war with them.”

“If we don’t stand up to them now, we will be at war with them eventually,” Greene told him. “That’s why I want to help Vietnam.”

“We can’t send arms,” said Senator Roosevelt, who despite his last name was not related to either president, either through blood or character. “People will view it as a hostile act.”

“And invading Vietnam was not?” said Greene in disbelief.

Everyone looked at their plates. Greene took a breath and tried to recalibrate.

“I think a good step here,” said Leiber, “would be to go to the UN and get sanctions. We can build a coalition. Like George Bush did during the first Gulf War. The first George Bush,” he added.

“No one takes the UN seriously,” said Grasso. “Besides, you don’t have the votes there. Frankly, I think I’d oppose sanctions myself. China is our biggest trading partner.”

Grasso headed the Armed Services Committee. If he wasn’t taking a hard stand against China, no one on his committee would. Not a single one.

Grasso was a guy who could tell which way popular opinion was running. He’d started out as a machinist in a small family-owned business, a “real blue-collar guy,” as the talking heads put it. He’d wandered into politics because the state wanted to take his backyard to expand a highway. He ended up on the town board, became a county party chairman, then a congressman and a real power in New York. He had numerous connections on both sides of the political aisle. And a long, long list of contributors.

Many of whom undoubtedly had Chinese connections.

Greene needed to persuade him.

“I am for sanctions,” said the president. “I’m going to push them personally in front of the UN. We’re raising a stink.”

“Why raise a stink when the Vietnamese started it?” asked Senator Jennifer Kraft. Kraft was the junior senator from Wisconsin, and until now, a vote Greene could generally count on.