Shock of War

Josh patted his face dry — rubbing his eyes would only make them hurt even more — then took a deep breath, trying to relax.

There was a tap on the door.

“You, uh, all right in there, Josh?” asked William Jablonski, a political consultant to the President who’d been pressed into service as his minder and media adviser. Jablonski slurred the “sh”; with his deep voice, it sounded as if he were hushing him.

“Yeah, yeah. Just getting my breath back.”

“The reporters have a few more questions.”

“Yup.”

Josh sat on the closed seat of the toilet and unrolled some more toilet tissue. When he’d been stuck behind the lines in Vietnam, he’d dreamed of the chance to tell the world what he had seen. That goal had kept him going, kept him alive. But at this point he really could use a break. A little more of a rest.

The questions were the same, over and over. He repeated the answers practically word for word:

Where did this happen?

Vietnam, the jungles near the Chinese border.

You saw all of this with your own eyes?

Yes.

How did you escape?

I had a phone — some SEALs were sent. And I guess, uh, some Army guys.

The last answer was, if not quite a lie, certainly not the whole truth. CIA officer Mara Duncan had been the person who found him in the jungle and truly saved him — the CIA had tracked his phone signal, then sent Mara to find and rescue him. But mentioning her — mentioning the agency’s involvement at all — would blow her cover, ending her usefulness in Southeast Asia, and probably ending or at least harming her career.

So he left her out of the answers.

“Josh?” asked Jablonski through the door.

“Yeah?”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m good.”

“The people from WINS have, uh, a deadline thing that they are hoping to meet. They want to talk, uh, about the bridge.”

“I’ll be out in just a sec,” Josh told him.

“Sure.”

The bridge. Someone had tried to blow him up, to stop him from getting to the UN. Those questions were harder to answer, since he wasn’t exactly sure who it was.

He was sure — he saw the man in his mind’s eye: early twenties, thin face, shaved head. Chinese, definitely Chinese.

Determined expression. Cold, hollow eyes.

Can’t they all just go away?

Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself. The people in Vietnam whose bodies he’d seen — they would gladly trade places with him. M?, the little girl he’d rescued: What would she think?

Josh rose, blew his nose again, then opened the door.

“All right,” he said to the reporters as he emerged. “Where were we?”

4

Aboard the USS McLane, South China Sea

Dirk “Hurricane” Silas strode onto the bridge of the McLane, his legs adjusting unconsciously to the gentle roll of the vessel as she plied northward across the South China Sea. No other job in the world could compare with being the master of a ship: no post in the Navy came close to that of captain of a warship. And few moments could compare with those when Commander Silas stepped onto the deck of his bridge. The melding of crew and vessel was never more perfect than that moment, when a glance at the helmsman’s steady hand on the wheel told Silas that the world — that his world — was steady and shipshape.

Silas often thought that he had been born several generations too late; his lust for the sea belonged more properly to the age of sail, when the elements were more immediate and a captain might truly strain his muscles in rallying his crew. But a scan of the bridge of any of the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers would remind even a landlubber that this age had wonders of its own. For a man to stand on this bridge, to know that this ship was under his control, answered to his voice — it was a heady and humbling feeling, and one that Commander Silas had worked all his life to obtain.

“Captain.”

Lieutenant Commander Dorothy Li, Silas’s executive officer, had been taking her turn on the bridge while he grabbed a brief respite. She nodded at him now, and so the routine began: the exchange of data, the trivial and the critical details merging.

The actual give-and-take of commanding a vessel, of keeping her on her course, of making sure her sailors were nourished in mind and spirit and emotion — they were little chinks and dents that accreted against the real core of the thing, the clean sense of duty and honor and courage that informed the soul of a sea captain, of a warrior following a path set by the Norse and beyond. Silas put up with the chinks and dents, attended to the details, because he knew they were the dues he paid for that brief moment on the bridge. He adjusted things deftly, attending to the needs of his ship’s various departments.

He consulted immediately with the chief petty officer who had discovered an unexplained deficiency in the food stores. Ordinarily the chief was the calmest of men, at least in dealing with his commander, but he had become high-strung of late. Tonight, he couldn’t account for two steaks — they were the most important of the items allegedly missing. Silas was reminded of Humphrey Bogart in the Caine Mutiny, and not in a particularly good way.

Almost surely it was an error in the tracking system or someone’s memory, Silas thought; he had no thieves aboard his ship.

It was the borderline hysteria that really bothered Silas. He dealt with it first by making a joke — perhaps the Chinese had somehow snuck aboard the ship — and when that failed to work, gave the chief a reassuring speech and a pat literally on the back. It was stress, he knew; they had been playing chicken with the Chinese now for several days, skirting the bastards’ bullying while obeying orders that prevented them from firing — from even defending themselves properly, in his opinion.

But that was hardly an excuse, and it was rather unseemly in a chief, a man who should be and was in many ways, part of the backbone of Silas’s command. The man would be eased out at Silas’s earliest opportunity. But that opportunity would not come for some time, surely, and as Silas needed him to function to his best ability, he would carry him until then, propping him up as best he could. A pat on the back was easy enough; if it could ease the pressure for a few hours, then Silas was all for it.

He went on to handle a few other minor matters, incidental bits of sand in the smooth grease of his warship’s gears. Internal matters squared away, he turned his attention to external — the real matter at hand.

For days now, they’d been shadowed by a Chinese cruiser and frigate. The Chinese spent most of the time sailing just over the horizon, ducking back and forth as he moved, sometimes across his course, more often dogging his stern. They had briefly attempted to block his path into Vietnam’s coastal waters — a move that could have started a war. They had threatened to interfere with his mission to send a helicopter to pick up a small group of SEALs rescuing some civilians — spies, he assumed, though the group included a small girl.

Whatever. The specifics of their mission didn’t interest him. More to the point was the principle that a U.S. warship went wherever it pleased. He hadn’t fired — doing so would have been against orders — but he had still managed to do his job and to prove the point.

Since then, the McLane had sailed northward toward the Gulf of Tonkin. She was