He glanced behind him, to where the second Sukhoi would’ve passed. He found it easily, a brackish trail of smoke heaving from one of its engines. In the same direction, a little farther on, an oil-black smoke cloud lingered in the otherwise perfectly clear sky. This could only be one thing — the other Sukhoi. His sidewinder must have found its mark. He’d tallied his first-ever air-to-air victory. He felt dizzy, which might have been loss of blood and might have been his body’s response to the thrill of this achievement.
Wedge now needed to climb to ten thousand feet. He still had his payload to deliver. Then he would figure out how to get home, or at least how to get far enough out to sea to bail out. Slowly, he climbed. His left rudder was shot out, making the plane skittish in its ascent and hard to control. Neither of his engines were at thrust capacity; the pair of them were bleeding fuel. Whatever damage he’d done to the second Sukhoi, it had done about the same to him. And as he climbed, that stubborn second pilot slotted in behind him, giving a limp chase.
Won’t matter, concluded Wedge. He was already past eight thousand feet.
He glanced down at the city spread before him. Little pits of light appeared in his vision. He tried to blink them away. Then a vertiginous darkness crept inward from his periphery as though he might black out again. The puddle he sat in kept deepening. When he looked at his altimeter, it was blurry too, but it soon read ten thousand feet. Wedge went through the arming sequence. His hands felt as though he wore several sets of gloves as he clumsily toggled through the switches and buttons and lined up his aircraft into its angle of attack. The Sukhoi was behind him, but he had thirty seconds, maybe more, until he’d need to deal with that.
A lot was going to happen in those seconds.
Everything was set. Wedge’s finger hovered over the button. Whatever wooziness or confusion he’d felt moments before had yielded to a perfect clarity.
He hit the release.
Nothing.
He hit it again.
And again.
Still, nothing. And now the Sukhoi was coming up to altitude, notching in behind him. Wedge struck the controls in his cockpit in frustration. He recalled the tenth Hornet in their squadron, the one that’d gone down in training days before. He thought they’d fixed this problem with the release mechanism. Apparently not.
Didn’t matter. He had a job to do.
Wedge pushed the stick forward, angling into a dive. The payload was going through its arming sequence, and if it was stuck on his wing he’d take it in himself. The Sukhoi didn’t follow but instead broke away, understanding the maneuver and evidently wanting no part of it. Not that it would’ve made a difference. The Sukhoi wouldn’t be able to put enough distance between itself and what was to come.
A sensation of weightlessness overtook Wedge as he dove.
The details below — buildings, cars, individual trees, and even individuals — were filling in fast. This business, war, the business of his family and of his country — he’d always accepted that it was a dirty business. He thought of his father and his grandfather — the only family he had — hearing the news of what he’d done. He thought of his great-grandfather, who’d flown with Pappy Boyington. And, strangely, he thought of Pappy and the old stories of him staring out through his canopy, scanning the horizon for Japanese fighters, a cigarette dangling from his lip before he’d toss it into the vastness of the Pacific.
The city was rushing up toward Wedge.
He’d told Admiral Hunt that he didn’t do suicide missions. Yet this didn’t feel like a suicide. It felt necessary. Like an act of creative destruction. He felt like he was the end of something and in being the end he would achieve a beginning.
Wind from the broken canopy was on his face.
At five hundred feet, he remembered the pack of celebratory Marlboros he’d tucked into his flight suit, in the left chest pocket. Though it was futile, he reached for them. This was his last gesture. His hand placed over his heart.
Three more men from internal security waited in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. They stepped onto the elevator with Lin Bao. Not a single introduction, no one speaking. His escort, the dark-suited man who’d taken him from the ministry, had the number of the suite where Zhao Leji and other key members of the Politburo were clandestinely meeting to discuss the appropriate strategic response to the sinking of the Zheng He.
Lin Bao had ideas as to what that response could be. He chose to focus on those ideas as opposed to why they were meeting at the Four Seasons and not some more secure location, or why they’d stepped out of the elevator on only the fifth floor and were now walking down a corridor with closely spaced rooms as opposed to suites. India’s involvement might prove a positive development, if leveraged correctly. An Indian intervention would make it so that the strikes against Galveston and San Diego would be the last of the war. If his country struck the final blow, they could make the argument — at least to their own people — that they had been the victors. And they could avoid what at this moment seemed like an inevitable counterstrike against another of their major cities — Tianjin, Beijing, or even Shanghai.
He would explain this to Zhao Leji, and to whoever else from the Politburo attended this meeting. Lin Bao imagined that Zhao Leji would place some of the blame for the Zheng He on his shoulders. After all, it had been his name on the deployment orders, not Zhao Leji’s, or that of any other member of the Politburo. They would likely accuse him of having exceeded his authority in a time of war, but nothing more than that. They would want to be rid of him. After peace was negotiated with the Americans, it would be easy for Lin Bao to convince Zhao Leji to turn the other way while he defected. If anything, a defection would help prove the substance behind the accusations Zhao Leji would surely level, which was that Lin Bao was untrustworthy, a secret ally of the Americans. Good riddance, they’d say. And he would return to the country of his mother’s birth. Maybe even to Newport, with his family. To teach.
By the time Lin Bao had walked to the far end of the corridor on the fifth floor, these ideas had calmed him, so that when the security man swiped the key card and gestured with a low wave of his hand for Lin Bao to step inside, he did so without any trace of fear.
He took a half dozen steps into the empty room. It wasn’t a suite. It was a single. There was a queen-size bed.
A console.
A dresser.
Everything, including the carpeted floor, was covered with plastic tarps, as though the room were undergoing a renovation.
Lin Bao stepped toward the bed.
Resting on its edge was a golf club, a 2-iron. He lifted it up. The familiar weight was pleasant in his hands. A note was attached to the shaft with a piece of string. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs, knowing it was likely the last such breath he might take. The writing on the card was blocky, the symbols formed by an untutored hand, the hand of a peasant. It read, This time you picked wrong. I am sorry.
It was unsigned. That’s how they survive, he thought. They never sign their names to anything.
From behind Lin Bao, a series of steps squished over the plastic. He could feel the presence of the large security man at his back, plus the three others who no doubt stood by the door, waiting to help clean up the mess. Lin Bao had an instinct to shut his eyes, but he fought it off. He’d watch, until the very end, in this grim room where there was little worth seeing. He peered out the solitary window, to the equally grim Beijing skyline. The idea that this — not his daughter’s face, nor the open ocean he loved — would be the last thing he ever saw filled him with self-pity and regret. He felt his throat constrict with those emotions in the same moment he felt the cold press of metal against the soft hairs at the base of his neck.