The stream had overflowed its banks. It rushed through the jungle, flooding a good eight or ten feet up into the trees on either side. Zeus paused when he reached the edge. The water’s path was wide but not particularly deep.
“Should we cross?” asked Chau. His voice had recovered to the point that he could speak normally without too much strain.
“I wonder if we could float down the stream,” said Zeus. “We could hit them at the bridge instead of the hamlet.”
“What?” asked Chau.
“If we lashed a few logs together, and just kind of floated down, you think it would work?”
“What would we use?”
“Just logs, and we could make some rope from the grass. They wouldn’t expect us to come down the stream.”
Chau said nothing. It was an outrageously impractical plan — a dream, really. Zeus was losing his mind.
“There are some rocks here,” said Zeus, wading into the water. “We’ll get to the other side and move down.”
The water was only a foot deep, except in the middle, where it quickly dropped another two feet. But they were able to scramble across without their weapons getting wet.
Building a log raft a la Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn — no way. But a canoe was perfect.
“Look at that!” said Zeus, shouting as he spotted the boat pushed against a pair of trees upstream.
It was a wooden boat, slightly battered and small, but perfect.
A dream, even. But it was real.
They loaded the missiles and launcher inside. Both of the long oars were missing, but it was easy to tug it along downstream. Chau, the lightest, sat inside, while Zeus and Angkor pulled it along. Snakes slithered by, and once Zeus swore he saw the eyes of a crocodile.
Swarms of flies buzzed around them. Every so often Zeus had to let go of the boat to swat at them. The only thing that really worked was to dip under the water to get away, and even that provided only a temporary respite.
“Bitchin’ flies,” he said to Chau.
“Maybe they are Chinese.”
Angkor said something.
“We are getting close,” Chau told Zeus. “Listen.”
They stopped. Zeus held his breath, but heard nothing. Then through the jungle came a familiar hum on the breeze.
Motors. Tanks or APCS.
“We’re getting very close,” he said.
A long highway bridge spanned the swamp. Peering from the trees at the bankside, Zeus could make out a quartet of trusses arching above the swollen water below the roadway. There were perhaps a dozen vehicles on the south side of the bridge — and what looked like an endless armada on the north.
“We can have our pick,” said Chau, standing next to him.
“I have a better idea,” said Zeus. “Let’s take out the bridge.”
21
Trying to rally the populace against the Chinese, the state media had begun a series of interviews with common citizens who had survived the war with the United States. The interviews were interspersed with old news footage from the war. Among the images that particularly bothered Perry were those showing American prisoners of war being marched through Hanoi and other Vietnamese cities.
History could easily repeat itself now in Beijing.
What would history say of his role? It wouldn’t know much about it, especially if the war escalated. Someone else would be in charge.
He had more pressing concerns.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Harland,” said Melanie Behrens, appearing at the door. “I had to talk to our consul in Saigon. Are you ready to go?”
Perry nodded at the ambassador. She glanced across the thick-paneled room where he’d been sitting.
“You’re not watching that propaganda, are you?” she asked, nodding at the television.
“Thought it might raise my spirits,” he said sardonically, following her out.
22
When he’d set out, he’d thought the north side would be the safest to use as an approach. But as he got closer to the bridge, he saw that the Chinese had troops on the south side patrolling near the bank. Thankfully the long shadows of the sun covered his side of the water. Still, he had to move carefully, half-holding his breath. He had no gun; it would have been ruined in the water.
Angkor and Chau were upstream, watching. If he was caught, they were to fire the missile at the center support, hopefully hitting and exploding it.
That was a long shot, and not just because it would take a steady hand to keep the targeting beam on the support. There were several supports around the beam, and blowing that one strut up probably wouldn’t take the roadway down.
Zeus had come up with an alternate plan — he’d arrange the two remaining warheads like an IED on the top spar at the center. They’d strike them with the third missile.
That was a long shot as well. But he’d seen the Iraqis do that at least twice on one of his training tapes. So he knew it could be done.
The Chinese were moving their forces very slowly, mustering on both side of the water. It wasn’t clear why, whether it was just their normal caution, or if the road farther south was submerged. It might also be that the firefight had given them enough of a bloody nose that they were now going to be extra cautious.
An APC sat in the water about fifty yards from the bridge. It was a Type 77, similar to the ones they had battled before. It was supposed to be amphibious, but it had bogged down in the thick muck.
The vehicles he could see on the shore to his left were more modern — wheeled WZ 523s — M1984s as far as the U.S. Army was concerned. There were a lot of them on the northern side of the bridge, perhaps an entire regiment.
Zeus slipped around the abandoned APC. The side door was open. He was tempted to stick his head inside, look, and see if anyone had forgotten their weapon in the rush to get out. But that was unlikely, and there was no sense besides: he couldn’t carry a rifle easily without getting it wet.
Tugging the case behind him, Zeus stopped as he spotted a trio of soldiers standing beneath the northern
