beaches were popular with regional tourists. Now they were abandoned, flooded about halfway up, and cluttered with debris and seaweed.
No motorboats.
They kept going. The sun was high enough now to hit Zeus in the corner of his eye, the sharp edge of a nail in the flesh between socket and lid. He squinted against it, angling his head away as much as he could while still keeping his gaze on the direction he wanted to go.
Except for the glare, the sun was welcome. It felt warm rather than hot. The day turned pleasant, with just enough breeze to scatter the flies and mosquitoes.
An idyllic day, except for where they were.
Zeus saw that Christian wasn’t paddling anymore.
“Christian?” said Zeus. “Christian?”
He slid his oar against the side of the boat. He should go check on his companion.
But eventually his dreams took strange shapes, past mixing with present. He was back in the plane when the attack on the dam began. The flight morphed into part of the war simulation as they looked at the shape war in Asia would take. He was driving the truck. He was shooting the guard in the airport.
He hadn’t shot the guard in real life. But he was powerless to prevent it from happening in the dream.
In the dream, he shot the man who came for them in the hallway, then stood over him, pistol pointing at his forehead, daring him to move, even though the man was already dead. Blood began to spurt from the dead man’s right eye, then his left. It started to pour from his nose and his mouth and his ears.
The hallway filled with blood. It flooded, rising to his knees, his stomach, his elbow. Zeus’s hand was wet with it.
Then finally he woke up.
Or so it seemed.
Christian was huddled in the front. A rasping noise came from his chest. He was snoring.
Zeus stretched his back muscles, turning left and right slowly, his joints cracking. Perhaps they’d be better off staying here until nightfall. They’d have more strength.
On the other hand, a moving fishing boat was a lot less conspicuous than one hung up in the weeds.
By his reckoning, the border with Vietnam was no more than forty miles away.
Zeus crawled forward in the boat to wake Christian. But when he reached him he decided to let him rest. Better that one of them would have full strength, or as much as a few fitful hours of sleep would get him.
He went back and took the oar, pushing the boat backward out of the weeds. For a moment, he lost his balance and the boat tipped hard to the side. Zeus just barely managed to stay upright. He knelt for a moment, hunkered over to catch his breath. Then he rose and began to make his way.
The current flowed gently southward, which made it much easier to paddle. Zeus concentrated on making perfect strokes — long, powerful, with a subtle movement at the very end to correct his course. Inevitably, he tired of this, finding perfection unachievable. He began to concentrate instead on everything around him: the open water to his left; the succession of ragged, battered beaches and flooded swamps on his right.
Farther inland, up in the inlets and on the other side of man-made dykes, were pens for fish farms. Given the horrible smell and the waste that he saw along the shoreline, he wondered what sort of poisons the fish would contain.
It was infinitely more dangerous than the other one, Zeus realized; this was the sort of craft that would take an interest in him. Its guns could easily chew through the wood of his purloined boat.
Zeus decided he would slip toward shore and wait a few hours until sunset. It would be easier to get by then, and in any event, he could use a rest.
But as he edged the oar forward to act as a rudder, he saw the bow of the patrol boat tuck down, as if swallowed by a sudden wave. The flag on the mast shot to the left. The boat was turning. They’d already spotted them.
15
And to emphasize the fact that
Not that it was working all that well this morning. Not that it
Matthews was enumerating, for perhaps the hundredth time since the crisis with China began, the dangers inherent in bringing a full carrier group into the Gulf of Tonkin.
The Army chief of staff, Renata Gold, shifted in her seat. The Army general — the first woman to hold the post — had been in favor of intervention early on, but lately had come under so much criticism that she seemed now cautiously opposed.
Caution being the watchword of the day.
“You’ve made your point about the aircraft carriers,” Walter Jackson, the National Security director, told Matthews. “But let’s cut to the quick: could they defeat the Chinese naval forces?”
“Absolutely,” said the admiral.
Jackson glanced toward Greene. The NSC head had a triumphant smile on his face.
“Good,” said Greene, reaching for his coffee.
“But that’s not an argument to intervene,” added Matthews hastily.
“Noted,” said Greene. “Now, about General Harland Perry’s plan. Two divisions — ”
“Impossible,” said Matthews sharply. “We can’t commit ground troops. Congress won’t back intervention.”
“If I might continue, Admiral,” said Greene. “Perry has suggested two American divisions could win back the gains the Chinese have made in the west. But he also notes that’s unrealistic, and I concur.”
That was a sop to Matthews. All Greene got from him was a tight frown.
“The goal, as I see it, should be simply to contain the Chinese,” said Greene. “We bring the A-10As there to stop the Chinese armor. That would be a first step. Then, establish a no-fly zone over the peninsula. F-22s and F- 35s.”
Greene glanced at Tommy Stills, the Air Force chief of staff and the one solidly hawkish member of the joint chiefs. He was nodding vigorously.
“The thing I need to be assured of,” added Greene, “is that this works. Is it doable? Do we stop the
