The men who were loading the fuel tanks were about fifty feet away. Zeus heard them talking as he crawled forward.
He stopped when there were just two trucks between him and the pump apparatus.
If he could make it to the other side of the apparatus without being seen, he could plant the bombs right on the machinery itself. The explosion would very likely take out the tank below.
One of the trucks he had passed began to move. Zeus dropped to the ground.
The men waved it forward. Zeus watched as it was filled. A red light came on near the pump. There was a shout. The light went off. Another truck started up.
He wasn’t going to get any closer than this, and if he waited too much longer, he’d be found.
Zeus crawled under the truck he’d been hiding behind. He rolled onto his back. He’d plant the charge against the chassis, and hope that the explosion was large enough and close enough to affect the pumps.
Blood rushed to his head as he flipped around. A wave of blackness shot through his brain and body.
Get through this, he told himself. But his brain remained in the dark static.
Zeus breathed slowly, willing his full consciousness back, but unable really to effect that — unable really to do anything but lie on his back in absolute darkness. The machinery hummed nearby. The ground vibrated. A few voices, nonchalant still, punctuated the deep hums.
Beyond that were the noises of the jungle:
Christian, of all people, brought him back.
“Where do we plant these?” he asked, tapping Zeus’s side.
“Under the center of the trucks,” said Zeus. “Or else near the gas tank — the truck’s gas tank. Whatever you can get to.”
“One apiece?” asked Christian.
“Yeah. They’re awful close,” said Zeus.
“They all went over to that truck at the far side,” said Christian. “They’re grabbing a smoke.”
Zeus turned his head. He didn’t see anyone nearby, and assumed Christian was right.
“String the wire back toward the berm where we can hide,” he told Christian. “You know how to connect them?”
“Yeah. Same way they were, right?”
“Exactly.”
Zeus scolded himself. He should have laid this all out before they started. He was flying too much by the seat of his pants — a good recipe for disaster.
“You take the two trucks to the left of us,” Zeus told Christian. “I think your wires will reach. Two charges per truck.”
“Two?”
“I don’t think we better risk doing more than that,” said Zeus. “Their break isn’t going to last forever. And that missing guard is going to be a problem. I’ll get this truck, and maybe two others. Anything happens, get the hell out of here.”
“No shit.”
Zeus could see again. Gray shades mostly in the dark, but it was something.
He went to work. Setting the charges was easy — Velcro straps were fixed to each, the ultimate in user- friendly destruction. He twisted the wires out, made sure of the connections — the terminals had jumpers so that the bombs were set in parallel rather than series, ensuring the others would blow even if one failed.
He crawled across to the next truck. He had four more packs. He set two, then crawled to the side, gathering his strength before pushing over to the next and last vehicle.
Just as he was about to get up, he heard the rough cough of a truck engine starting above him. He pulled back, centering himself, worried that he would be run over. In the next moment he realized the engine had been started on the next truck over, the one he’d been about to climb under. He watched the wheels move, the vehicle being maneuvered out of its spot.
This is as far as you should go, he told himself.
A second later, another truck pulled alongside the vacated space. He caught a strong whiff of diesel — the truck had just been freshly loaded.
He’d do one more.
The truck stopped and the driver hopped out of the cab. Zeus bellied across the open space to the other truck. His fingers fumbled for the explosives, made the connections, unraveled the wire. There was a knot — he ignored it, stringing back to the other truck, pushing now, careless and frantic, even as a voice inside his brain told him to calm down, to go slow and not leave himself so vulnerable to stupid mistakes and the great weight of chance and disaster that accompanied them.
Christian was waiting for him back at the berm. Zeus took his wires and wordlessly connected them to the plunger, moving quickly.
“When are we going to detonate it?” asked Christian.
Zeus’s answer was to press the plunger. In the next moment, the night exploded, a fireball rushing like a volcano across the Chinese fuel trucks.
6
“Well, that’s the last nail in that coffin,” said Lucas, turning the television off with his remote control.
“What’d you expect? Damn China lobby’s been working overtime,” said Grease. “Half the people on that committee are in Beijing’s pocket. Greene is never getting a bill through Congress. He’s lucky he won’t be impeached for suggesting it.”
Lucas fiddled with the Coke can on his desk. It was empty and slightly dented, kept there as a toy. He looked at Mara. “Maybe we can open up the old Sky Acres Express.”
“I’m sure it’s possible,” she said. “If you can get the money.”
Sky Acres was the name of an air transport company Mara had used to bring Russian weapons into Malaysia. The company — actually a pair of pilots who would kill their grandmothers if the price were right — had flown a wide variety of gear to the forces fighting the Chinese-backed insurgency. Using Sky Acres had allowed the agency to move much quicker than it might have. More important, it made possible deals with middlemen that might have been embarrassing or even impossible through regular channels.
“You’ll never get a go-ahead,” said Grease. “Not legal.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Lucas. “Frost has already floated the idea.”
“This is different than Malaysia,” said Green. “You have a moratorium you have to deal with.”
“The director is working on that,” said Lucas.
“I don’t want to hear it,” said Grease.
“You didn’t.”
The moratorium — actually a law banning American participation in weapons sales to a long list of countries — was stringent enough to forbid the indirect sales covered by Sky Acres, according to every agency and administration lawyer who had gone over it. That was largely because, while it was never publicized by the congressional aides who drew it up, the law was a response to the shipping of the Russian weapons into Malaysia, which had made use of a loophole in previous export controls.
“They need a lot of help,” said Grease. “A lot of it. This isn’t Malaysia. The sort of things Vietnam is going to need are big. Hell, they’re a third-world country facing a first-world army. They need a lot of weapons. Antitank missiles, SAMs.”
