Shock of War

The line shifted. Mara moved with it. Grease took a spot near the back.

Grease was retired — he’d been shot up badly a few years while helping the Philippines government. Grease had spent somewhere over thirty years working in various places in Asia. He’d even been in Malaysia, briefly, when Mara was there, which was how she knew him.

She got her coffee — just a regular — and moved around toward the end of the line. Grease was chatting up two young — and pretty — office workers. Add their ages together, and they’d still come up more than a few years shy of his.

“Ask this one,” he told them, nodding toward Mara. “She’ll tell you.”

“Tell them what?”

“How good I am in bed.”

“He’s good, all right,” said Mara. “Loudest snorer in the bunch.”

“Only after a full meal and extra dessert,” said Grease. “And I don’t mean ice cream.”

The two women exchanged a glance, then did their best to ignore them.

“You’re going to get written up for sexual harassment,” said Mara.

“That’s the beauty of being a contract worker,” said Grease. “I can’t be fired.”

“They can terminate your contract.”

“For flirting? If I knew it was that easy, I would have tried it years ago”

“I wouldn’t elevate what you do to the status of flirting,” countered Mara.

“Be kind.” Grease winked at her. “Hang on for a minute, will you? I have to get my caffeine fix.”

Grease ordered an Americano — a shot of espresso in water, so that it had the flavor of a very strong coffee.

“Reminds me of the coffee machine in the Bangkok office,” he said, putting a top on the cup.

“I doubt that,” said Mara.

“How is Bangkok?”

“Still there, last I saw.”

Grease smiled. They walked out into the hall. “You coming in to see Peter?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m working for him,” said Grease. “Come on.”

They walked past the glassed-in courtyard and across to a staircase, taking it down three flights. That was Grease — pushing seventy, with more replacement parts in him than a used car, and he still preferred what he called “the juice of the dance” to being carried.

He told Mara that he had been called back “to take a look at things” in Vietnam and China.

“A lot going on,” he said as they cleared the second landing and headed for the third. “This Cho Lai — he’s some piece of work.”

“The Chinese were desperate for a strong leader,” said Mara.

“They got that in spades,” said Grease. Downstairs, they passed a security point, then entered a part of the building strongly shielded against eavesdropping equipment. Grease buzzed them through a door into a secure hallway with a series of small offices. These were temporary workplaces, where temporary assignees like Grease could hold conversations and work with sensitive material. He paused in front of an office door.

“You left your cell phone upstairs, right?” asked Grease. “No electronics.”

“I know that.”

“Just checking.”

He smiled, punching the combination into the lock.

“I heard somebody blew your cover,” Grease told Mara inside.

“You know who?”

“Obviously it was the Chinese. Question is how long they’ve known.”

Mara had been wondering that herself. It could very well have been back in Malaysia, given all that had gone down there. But there were also problems with the Hanoi station, and Mara strongly suspected a double agent there had passed along the information.

“You think this kills me?” she asked.

“Hell no. You know how many times the Russians figured out who I was? Five or six different incarnations. Nothing stops the Peter Principle,” Grease said. “You’ll rise to your appropriate level of incompetence, I guarantee. You have a long way to go.”

Mara smiled.

“Speaking of Peter,” added Grease. “Before you go up to see him, there’s a company I wanted to ask you about: Maccu Shang Shipping. A Philippine company. Sorry about the cramped space.”

The room was tiny, with a bare desk, a pair of computer terminals, and two steel-and-vinyl chairs. Mara and Grease were sitting almost knee to knee.

“I know Shang,” she told him. “The Philippines is a front. They’re Chinese.”

“You’re positive? The evidence looks a little ambiguous.”

“They’re definitely Chinese.”

“Five ships leased to the company left Macau last night and headed for Zhanjiang. Southern China. Big navy port.”

“See?”

“Turns out some of our friends at the agency that doesn’t exist happened to be tracking an army unit that was just sent there, real fast. Seems like they’re in the port, waiting for something.”

The agency that doesn’t exist was Grease’s quaint way of referring to the NSA, or National Security Agency, which specialized in eavesdropping. His pseudonym came from a popular nickname for the agency, formed from its initials: No Such Agency.

“They’re getting on the ships?” asked Mara.

“Don’t know. I have to check back in. They may be there already. A lot of things to keep tabs on. That one just happened to catch my interest.”

“Shang Shipping brought all sorts of stuff into Malaysia,” said Mara. “A lot of different things.”

“Troops?”

Mara wasn’t sure about that. The Chinese had smuggled some paramilitary and guerillas into the country as advisers, but most of their help to the rebels had been in the form of equipment. The ships had filed manifests that said they were shipping food to Burma — as unlikely an arrangement as Mara had ever heard of.

The Chinese unit’s identity interested Grease — they were commandos, not regular army, and apparently not assigned to the amphibious assault that was to have been launched from Hainan.

“My question is where would they go?” said Grease.

“Could be anywhere,” said Mara. “Vietnam has a long coast.”

“The NSA suggested Hai Phong. Someone attached to the unit apparently gathered some sort of electronic information — I’m guessing that it had to do with a GPS system. But you know them. They won’t admit they know anything.”

“Did they have assault ships?”

“No,” said Grease. “I’m wondering if they might just try sailing into the port.”

“Do the Vietnamese still hold Hai Phong?”

“They do. Were you there?”

“No, we didn’t get that far west.”

Grease asked her a few more questions about the status of things in Vietnam. He commented that the country seemed surprisingly calm for one under siege. Mara wasn’t so sure about that; in her experience, sanity and insanity mixed all the time.

“You going upstairs?” asked Grease, glancing at his watch.

“Yeah.”

“Well, come on. I’ll escort you. We want to get up in time to see your boyfriend testify before the Senate.”

“My boyfriend?”

“Looks like I hit a nerve,” said Grease, opening the door. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that shade of red on you cheeks before.”