Shock of War

It took nearly fifteen minutes to reach the hotel, which was guarded by a platoon of Vietnamese soldiers. Zeus had to argue with the platoon commander to get him to allow the kid to come into the hotel so he could be paid. The boy’s English was better than the lieutenant’s.

When Zeus had been here last, the hotel lobby and bar had been filled with foreigners. Now they were empty except for a desk clerk and four security officers. The security men, all in their mid-fifties, refused to allow the boy upstairs. Zeus told him to wait by the elevator and he would get his money.

“No no,” said the kid fearfully. “You leave, Linkin out.”

“You think they’ll kick you out?”

“You leave, Linkin gone.”

Zeus glanced at the guards. The kid was undoubtedly right. He walked over to the desk clerk.

“Major Murphy,” said the man brightly. “We are glad you have come back to us.”

“I need to pay my friend here,” Zeus said. “He gave me a ride.”

The clerk glanced at the boy, then made a face.

“You have ten bucks?” Zeus asked.

The clerk began scolding the boy in Vietnamese. The boy answered back, defending himself.

“It’s all right,” Zeus told the clerk. “I have it upstairs. I’ll pay you right back.”

“I do not have any money to lend,” said the clerk.

Zeus knew the hotel did keep small sums of money, both American and Vietnamese, at the desk; Perry had borrowed some a few days before to pay a local driver.

“Can’t you just lend it to me for a minute?”

“These children are thieves,” said the clerk, getting to the heart of the problem. “You pay, it encourages them.”

“Zeus, what are you doing out of jail?”

Zeus turned around and saw Christian striding out of the elevator.

“Hey, you got ten bucks?” Zeus asked.

“Ten bucks?”

“Kid gave me a ride. I gotta pay him.”

“Get outta here.”

“Come on, Christian. I’m good for it.”

Christian pulled out his wallet. “All I got’s a twenty.”

“That’ll do.”

Zeus took it and gave it to Linkin. The worried look immediately vanished.

So did the twenty.

“You need help, you ask for Linkin,” he said. “Linkin best guide to Hanoi.”

The boy turned and ran from the lobby, undoubtedly escaping before the hotel people could intervene.

“You owe me twenty,” said Christian.

“And you owe me your life,” said Zeus. “How come you’re not in the hospital?”

Christian shrugged. “I’m tougher than you.”

Zeus laughed. “Your problem, Win, is that you believe it.”

12

Alexandria

Mara knew something was up when she didn’t see the marshal in the hotel hallway. She knocked on Josh’s door anyway, then called his room from hers. There was no answer.

After changing, she went down to the lobby and sat on one of the plaid-fabric couches next to the plastic ficus tree to wait for him. There was a television in the corner of the room, tuned to CNN. Mara went over and changed the station to a sports network showing a tennis match.

An hour later, when he still hadn’t come in, she knew he had left.

Without saying good-bye?

Impossible.

She waited another hour. She had no way of contacting him — she didn’t even have the marshal’s cell phone number.

She could get it from the marshal’s service.

Mara held off, thinking it would seem too… what, exactly? Like she was worried about him? Or infatuated with him.

More the latter. Which she wasn’t. Except she was.

Finally, after she’d been sitting for nearly three hours, Mara’s cell phone rang. She nearly jumped from the couch.

“Hello?”

“Where is he?” demanded Jablonski.

“What?”

“Mara, where the hell is Josh?”

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“The marshal service says they’re taking him home. What the hell is going on?”

“I have no idea what’s going on. You’re supposed to be helping him. Why did you let him go before that committee? They made him look foolish.”

“They’re the ones who look foolish. I told him not to say anything about the Chinese,” Jablonski added, flustered. “I specifically told him not to call them murderers. I told him not to use that word.”

She clicked off the phone and got up. Time to get something to eat, she decided. And think.

13

Aboard the McLane

“They’re too far away.”

Silas looked at the image on the computer screen. The McLane’s present course was plotted against the expected course of the merchant vessels he’d been assigned to intercept. The line ended at Hai Phong — about ten miles shy of the vessels.

“That’s at flank speed,” added Lt. Commander Li. “And it assumes the merchant ships will continue moving slowly. They’re only doing about six knots.”

“We need to go faster,” said Silas.

He turned and looked around the destroyer’s combat information center, or CIC. Stuffed with data screens and high-tech gear, the space was the McLane’s nerve center, literally the brain and spine of the vessel’s warfighting ability.

Long before Silas’s time, a destroyer’s chartroom served as a primitive information center, in some ways as much a library as think tank. But the advent of sensors such as radar and sonar greatly increased the size and function of the combat information center, and by World War II, the CIC was the most important compartment on the ship, with due respect to the bridge. Its function since then had not so much changed as it’s been refined and expanded with advances in technology. The destroyer’s sensors — and the information beamed from elsewhere, generally via satellite — put unparalleled intelligence at the commander’s beck and call.

The downside of all of this information was that it had to be processed, which meant not only machines but people who could help make sense of what the instruments told them, and not bombard the captain or weapons officer with isolated bits of intel. The modern CIC — also known by the more modern names of Combat Display Center and Combat Direction Center — was as high-tech as the bridge on a fictitious starship, and in her own realm just as dangerous.