Shock of War (41 page)

If they went due north, then cut west, they should see Chinese troops. There were two companies waiting out the storm inside the trucks along the road. Another was back in the hamlet.

“We have to get through that lane over there,” Zeus told Captain Kim when he'd collected all his men. “There are some buildings where it meets the local highway. That should give us a vantage point to see up the road. The Chinese stopped about three miles farther north before the rain hit. We should be able to take the road.”

He waited for Major Cha
Å«
to translate. The captain nodded vigorously.

Ten minutes later, Zeus and the two Vietnamese privates who were acting as point men drew close to the back of the buildings at the southeastern quadrant of the intersection. There were three structures, all squat and dark. The tallest was a service station.

Zeus used two garbage cans as a makeshift ladder, scrambling up the garage roof. It was made of metal, and between the pitch and slippery rain, Zeus had to climb on all fours.

Just as he reached the apex, his AK-47 slipped off his shoulder and clanked against the metal roof. He cursed himself, pulling the gun strap back in place.

When he put his head up, he saw dozens of Chinese armored vehicles scattered along the road around the intersection. A pair of Z99 tanks sat in the middle of the crossroads.

The Chinese had moved south during the storm.

13

Forthright, Ohio

“Pretty damn warm day,”
said Tex, putting down the ax to take off his jacket. “Must be all this global warming you're studying, right?”

“Believe it or not, no,” said Josh. “I mean, it could be, but a warm day like this in February? That sort of thing has been happening forever. Climate change is more subtle.”

“Droughts are subtle?”

“I mean, the effects of climate change are very complex.” Josh picked up his sledgehammer and positioned the splitting wedge over a log. It had been Tex's idea to cut the family some firewood. Josh had readily agreed, not so much because it was an easy way to thank them for putting him up, but because the exercise would make him forget about Mara.

If he could forget.

He swung the hammer down, getting the wedge in place for the real blow.

“So droughts—they're the result of climate change?” said Tex, picking up the ax again.

“Yeah. Well, in aggregate.”

“Jesus, Doc. I hate to say this, but you sound like a politician. Mincing your words. You never say what you mean.”

Josh sighed. Actually, he could be extremely precise, talking about numbers and percentages and statistics.

“It's the trend that's important,” he told Tex. “Climate change means more droughts. More warm winters like this. Which, for some places is good.”

“I like it,” said Tex. “Don't need a coat.”

Josh swung the sledge. The log split cleanly in half.

God, he missed Mara. He'd tried calling twice, but his calls went straight to voice mail.

He hadn't bothered to leave a message. Too much to say.

He bent and took another piece of wood from the pile.

14

South of Halong Bay

Zeus pushed his eye
against the aiming sight, whispering just loudly enough for Major Cha
Å«
to hear. The tank was zeroed in.

The two team leaders peering over his shoulder mumbled something as Cha
Å«
translated the aiming procedure. Zeus leaned back, letting them take a look.

The clouds were moving away. Though it was still a good hour before the sun would rise, the sky was already light gray with a false dawn. The dark smudges they'd seen when they landed were now reasonable facsimiles of trees and buildings.

Zeus had set up two teams on a small rise on the west side of the road, with a clear line to both tanks. Two other crews were gathered around a launcher a short distance away, their weapon aimed at the second tank. Little more than a kilometer separated the launchers from their targets. Easy shots.

“They are ready,” said Cha
Å«
.

“All right. Wait until I say fire.”

Zeus trotted over to the other teams. He'd already sighted their weapons.

Just as Zeus reached them, there was a loud pop behind him. Zeus turned to see smoke billowing from the rear of the launcher he had just left.

Shit!

“Fire!” he yelled. “Fire! Fire!”

The missile leapt from the launcher next to him. There was a hiss and a low
thur-rump-the.
The Russian antitank projectile flew across the field and road, streaking along the line set by the laser beam. Racing against the reddish light, it didn't stop when it came to the steel hull of the Chinese tank. The missile didn't realize it had found its target, much less know what its mission was. It kept flying, penetrating into the steel shield and body, exploding in madness and frustration as the red laser light disappeared.

The men inside the tank never knew that they had been fired on. From their perspective, there was a brief, terrible premonition of death, then nothing.

“Load the next one, the next one,” Zeus told the men. “Aim at the APCs. As we planned. As we planned.”

“Yes, Major,” said the team leader. He spoke a little English. The others were already loading a second missile.

Zeus ran to Cha
Å«
. “Why the hell did you fire?” he yelled.

“The top of the tank opened. We were afraid we had been seen.”

The other missiles were launching, whizzing across the field. Zeus ran to the squat flat-roof building next to the service station, where he had set up two more teams. As he started to climb, he heard one of the missiles being launched. He got to the top and saw steam furling from the nearest APC.

More missiles fired. Figures began stumbling from the houses up the street. The Vietnamese began firing their AK-47s, gunning them down.

It was working.

“Major! Major!”

Zeus went to the back of the building, where Cha
Å«
was calling up to him.

“We have to get back to the boat,” said Cha
Å«
. “We have to get back for the second attack.”

“You're right,” said Zeus. He leapt off the back of the building, rolling to his feet after he hit the ground.

*   *   *

“Everything is running late,”
said Cha
Å«
, glancing at his watch as the PBR skittered southward, away from the peninsula where they'd landed and launched the attack.

“Yeah,” said Zeus, steadying himself against a spar at the side of the boat.

Cha
Å«
's point was that the second attack would be made during the day, greatly increasing the danger. But there was no sense waiting now. The other units would be on alert because of this attack.

As soon as they fired all of their missiles, Captain Kim and the teams would work their way south toward the second attack point; with luck they would meet up by nightfall to be evacuated.

The Stolkraft met the PBR about two miles north of Hai Phong, the rest of the teams crowded so tightly on the deck of the boat they looked like refugees escaping the war. The PBR took on three men, a full team, then turned and followed the Stolkraft north to the second landing point, a marshy area inland from Dong Dui.

The two boats treaded through a run of islands and jutting fingers of land, heading for a narrow estuary stream that extended nearly sixteen miles from the ocean. They were near Halong Bay, an upended jaw of earth, where some two thousand limestone and dolomite teeth poked through the water, flashing at the dragons said to haunt the area.

A bridge ran over a creek about three miles inland. About a mile north of the bridge was a hamlet where two companies of Chinese APCs had parked before the storm. The units were the farthest south of the Chinese infantry.

Fog drifted in from the ocean, the mist curling around islets of pillar-shaped rocks and tree-covered spits of land. The sun played through the mist, cutting it like a sword, flashing against the white rock sides to reveal intricate clefs and scars. The storm had pulled many trees down, and the two boats had to trim their engines to tread through the debris. The ends of tree trunks poked up like the elbows of dead sailors, and the dark hulks of the submerged branches loomed just below the surface, shifting like mythical beasts waiting to spring from the water and swallow the small PBR whole.

Zeus rubbed his arms, suddenly cold. The rounded crags towering over him made him feel puny and small, showing him just how insignificant he was, how tiny, how unimportant.

Kerfer's words came back to him:

It's not your war.

Standing on the forward deck, he realized nothing was his, not these looming green and white shadows around him, or the still-angry water. And especially not the hulking green earth behind them.

By that logic, too, not one thing he possessed was his—not the gun loaned to him, not his boots, not his own arms or legs. The earth was the possessor of all things, not him; he was just another speck flicking across the sun, throwing a momentary shadow across the water.

And as he contemplated that puniness he thought of Anna, thought of the soft way she had fallen into him, thought of her kiss and the touch of her lips. It was an antidote to his depression—the sunlight that pushed away the fog.

This wasn't his war, but it had brought her to him, and for that reason alone—for that reason beyond fate or chance, beyond even his duty—he would fight this war. He would find her and free her. Because they couldn't deny him anything. He was their hero.

The debris thickened as they began inland. Two soldiers were detailed to push some of the logs away. They began cheerfully enough, one of the men even laughing at some joke. But within moments one had slipped and fallen into the water, and by the time he was pulled out he was covered with bruises, and his arm seemed to have been badly sprained. There was no more laughter after that.

Finally, they reached the mouth of the stream that would take them up toward the bridge. They passed into what looked like a clear lake: the typhoon had swelled the stream far beyond its banks, and rather than the farm fields Zeus expected they passed telephone lines and the tops of trees. The shoreline had completely disappeared. Even the boat captain was amazed at how high the water level had risen.

“The water is much higher than normal,” Cha
Å«
explained, translating what the boat captain told him. “Higher even than during some rainy seasons. He expects that the area you wished to land will be flooded. It may be flooded all the way to the bridge, if the water is this high here.”

Ordinarily, that might not have been a problem, but their experience farther north made Zeus worry that the Chinese might have moved down to the bridge. He took out his map and conferred with the boat captain, trying to decide on an alternate spot.

“The captain says there is a stream that runs beneath the highway a little farther north,” said Cha
Å«
. He pointed on the map. “There is high land on the west side. If we landed there, we would be only about two miles south of the hamlet.”

“All right, let's try it,” said Zeus.

They pulled across to the Stolkraft, and after a few words the PBR captain slid his vessel ahead, steering it through a patch of muddy water. They passed a set of wooden staves on the left, fence posts that separated small fish pens from the rice paddies behind them. The boundary had been erased.

A fork loomed ahead. The boat captain started spinning the wheel, pushing the PBR to port side. As he did, something shot through the air a few inches from Zeus.

Zeus's first thought was that it was a swarm of insects; they'd passed several already. Then another part of his brain pushed him to his knees.

They were being fired on.

The soldier manning the forward machine gun started blasting the trees to the right. Soldiers on both boats started yelling and returning fire with a vengeance.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” yelled Zeus, seeing that the Chinese had already stopped shooting. There had been one or two men at most. “You're wasting ammo!”

He turned around and shouted at the captain. “Get us out of here! Get us upstream! Go! Go!”

The captain had already gunned the throttle. The PBR lurched forward, pushing toward a group of houses on the left. Meanwhile, the soldiers on both boats continued shooting. Zeus scanned the opposite shore, but saw nothing—no flashes, not even an area of cover where someone could be firing from.

“Cha
Å«
! Cha
Å«
! Get them to stop firing!” yelled Zeus. “Just get the boats up to a place to where we can get off. We're wasting ammo.”

He looked behind him but couldn't see Cha
Å«
. One of the sailors had grabbed a rifle and was standing next to the captain on Zeus's left, firing wildly. From the wild look on his face Zeus knew he was simply firing from fear, without any target. He kept shooting until he'd run through the magazine.

Zeus saw Cha
Å«
crawling across the deck toward him. He ducked down and yelled in his ear.

Cha
Å«
yelled something from his crouch, but his voice was hoarse and even Zeus, right next to him, couldn't hear.

“Tell me the words for ‘cease fire,'” yelled Zeus. “We need to get us ashore.”

Cha
Å«
's voice was gone, and even leaning against Zeus's ear, couldn't make himself heard over the din. The boat lurched hard to port, then back, swerving wildly. Something clunked hard against the side, and Zeus thought they'd been hit by a shell or a grenade. But it had only been the top of a fence post, brushing against the hull.

Zeus rose, pulling Cha
Å«
with him.

“There's a road ashore,” Zeus yelled at the captain. He pointed ahead, where he saw the crown of a dirt road rising above the water. “Get us there! Go!”