On the flight to Beijing, the pilot announced that the PLA had won a great victory. The island of Kinmen had fallen to the combined might of the PLA defense forces, and the party was confident that total victory over the “breakaway province” of Taiwan would be attained within a matter of days. The plane erupted in applause and raucous self-congratulations.
“What about those bastard terrorists in Kazakhstan?” someone called out.
A man from first class entered coach class. He didn’t look like a high-level party functionary to Riser, but more like a Gong An Bu agent. There was a thuggish air about him despite the well-tailored Mao suit. He talked to the man who’d raised the question about the PLA’s offensive against the Muslim terrorists in Kazakhstan. The man, a short, pasty-faced individual, looked terrified, the man from first class bending over him.
Charles ordered a Tsing Tao beer. He needed to relax. Everything was getting too hyper. Confusing. Should the U.S. be backing the PLA offensive in Kazakhstan if China had started a war against Taiwan? Whatever the situation, surely the U.S., in its own interests, if not those of the Taiwanese, couldn’t let the island nation be governed by the Communists. It was America’s airstrip in East Asia. The Cold War, Charlie mused, for all its anxiety, was at least clearer, or seemed so. But sipping his beer, he concluded that probably in every war, including this one, the present always seemed confusing, as confusing as the jigsaw puzzle of World War I, which, with benefit of hindsight, seemed remarkably easy to understand. In fact, as any historian knew, it had been a puzzling complex of alliances, backroom deals, and parties who were friends one month and enemies the next—plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
He remembered his grandfather, one of the very few World War II veterans still alive, telling him about the utter confusion during that war when it came to who was on whose side. Italy was against us, then with us. The Romanians switched back and forth, some Ukrainians fought with the Nazis, and France was Britain’s great ally, but not Vichy France. Churchill ordered the British navy to sink the great French fleet in North Africa, killing French sailors, allies only weeks before, to ensure that the Nazis could not use the French fleet once France had fallen. Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Far East, accepted the Japanese surrender in 1945, only to turn around and rearm the Japanese, using them as an ad hoc police force throughout Burma and Southeast Asia to prevent rioting mobs, the very people Mountbatten had been fighting for a few weeks earlier.
Great or small, Charlie decided, all war was byzantine, and all he cared about was living to see Li Kuan, like Saddam Hussein, hunted down and killed. That wasn’t confusing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I need some fresh air,” announced Aussie. “Anyone else?”
“I’ll come,” said David.
Sal and Choir, ignoring scatological insults from Aussie about Welsh wankers and Brooklyn Dodgers being lazy, elected to catch some sleep in the motel room Freeman had booked for them down the hall.
Outside, the streets were all but deserted, only patrol cars with slit wartime headlights moving slowly to enforce the curfew. A few dark shapes were visible in the weak penumbra of police headlights as people scuttled here and there, briefly silhouetted as they quickly slipped in and out of stores for emergency supplies. The Coast Guard — Canadian as well as American — were assuring the population via radio and TV that there was no danger of leaking radiation from the sunken vessels — that all the reactors on nuclear-powered U.S. warships were built to such rigorous standards that “there is little possibility of a split in the reactor.”
A motorcade passed by Aussie and David, including a Navy staff car bearing Margaret Jensen on a mission of mercy to Woodgate Hospital. Her intention was to show fearlessness in the face of the radioactivity scare and visit as many of the victims as she could. First she wanted to see Alicia Mayne and the other survivors of Utah.
Also, concerned about the welfare of the survivors of the sinkings, the commander of Fort Lewis had called Freeman, telling him it would be a good idea to have Medal of Honor winner Brentwood make himself useful at the hospital. “Be a damned good morale lift for our men and women. And it’d take him out of himself.”
“Good idea,” agreed Freeman, thinking, You wily polecat—can’t let the Navy grab Marte Price’s attention. Army Medal of Honor winner beats an admiral’s wife any day of the week, and the Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon would like what Fort Lewis did. “I’ll send him up, General,” said Freeman.
“How’d he do with the Bullpup?” the Fort Lewis commander inquired.
“Not well,” said Freeman bluntly, tired from watching Darkstar’s feed.
“So now he knows,” said the commander.
“Not sure about that,” said Freeman.
“Have him wear the ribbon, Douglas.”
Freeman called David on his cell phone. “Captain, get your butt up to the hospital. You are to go about, shake hands with those poor bastards, and smile! You know Marte Price?”
“Yes, sir. Skirt with the big tits.” It wasn’t David, but Lewis, listening in as usual.
“Lewis?”
“General?”
“You get back here. Monitor the UAV rerun. You’ve had enough fresh air.”
“Roger that.”
David flipped the cell phone shut. “Old man,” he told Aussie, “didn’t like that. What you said about the CNN reporter.”
Aussie shrugged as they headed back past the ferry terminal. To the east lay Whidbey Island, where, if all went well, the Navy would be launching the NR-1B. “Don’t shag any of the nurses up there!” he called back to David, who was already ascending the hill toward the hospital, pretending not to hear.
David knew his mission to the hospital was merely to smile and say a few words of encouragement. But after Afghanistan, he felt like a fake.
The exiting air from the hospital’s wards hit him in a toxic blast of charcoal-reeking burned flesh, oil and antiseptics. Mounds of soiled and blood-soaked sheets, blackened and singed naval uniforms, and ruined clothes that had belonged to civilians caught up in the infernos of the multiple disasters were now piling up in the corridors faster than the frantic staff could dispose of them in already overflowing Dumpsters. The ash of the hospital’s incinerator fell outside like gray snow as the staff worked overtime to cremate limbs and flesh contained in thick “recycled” paper shrouds designated by hurriedly wielded marker pens as “unusable,” any possible skin graft material being rushed in sterilized containers to the refrigerators. It was a scene so suffused with urgency and horror that David turned around to leave. The last thing anyone in this hospital needed was some Medal of Honor winner getting in the way when a split second’s delay in inserting an IV tube or in any of the surgical lifesaving procedures the ER staff were carrying out could cost someone their life.
“Captain Brentwood? David Brentwood?” The woman’s voice was accompanied by a glare of light from a shoulder-held KEMO TV camera, a scruffy looking, gum-chewing technician in obligatory faded jeans, and what Freeman would have called a half-ass beard, approaching David. The reporter, despite the long, rushed trip from Atlanta, looked as alert and as well-coiffed as any well-rested anchor. She extended her right hand, her left clasping the phallic-shaped mike. “Captain, I’m Marte Price.”
Before he knew it, David was shaking hands with the woman. She was taller than she looked on TV, where her legs, shapely as they were, were not on display; unlike her bosom, which had stopped many a channel surfer dead in his tracks. Her height added to her aura of vivacious authority. Despite his annoyance with her sudden and what he considered rude interruption, David felt a surge of excitement in his loins. Her sexuality, her perfume, was so alive and contrary to the misery and death surrounding them that he had no control over the kind of excitement she infused in him, a kind he’d not known since long before his near-mortal wounding in Afghanistan.