Stephie was alive. A smile bloomed on Bill’s face. He raised his gaze to Fielding’s severe visage. The perceptive professor’s eyes dropped to the floor. “Before you make your mind up about this offer, Mr. President, would you give me the opportunity to make a few points.”
“You’re too late, Dr. Fielding,” the elated commander in chief replied. He felt as if a great weight had been lifted from him. As if in a world of compromises he had finally been afforded one perfect, clean fix.
“Then one point, only, sir, if I might,” the CIA director insisted. “Exchanges are tricky. Physically. Mechanically. Logistically. I’m talking just the pure nuts and bolts of the handover.”
“What’s so tricky?” Bill asked. “They hand over the ten thousand prisoners first, then Stephie and I just walk out onto the bridge and…” He stopped himself. They would both be there exposed on a half destroyed bridge. The Chinese could pour fire onto them. There would be no chance of escape. “But they want me alive, not dead,” Bill countered, rebutting the obvious point to which he had leapt after catching up with Fielding. “They want a show trial with me as its star defendant. We’ll cross the bridge. I’ll walk more slowly than Stephie. She’ll make it to the friendly bank before I make it to the Chinese side.”
“What if the whole thing is a trick?” Fielding asked, ruthlessly shredding Bill’s perfect fix.
“They want me alive!” Bill insisted. Fielding yielded that point with a nod. Still, Bill knew that he had cut short Fielding’s long list of reasons why he shouldn’t turn himself over to the Chinese. First and foremost, Bill presumed, was his constitutional duty. He felt compelled to defend his decision. “This country will go on without me. The war will be prosecuted. The nation led. Glen Simon is a good man. That’s why we have vice presidents. I’ll transfer my authority before I walk out onto that bridge. I’m not king, I’m president. The succession will be seamless.” Fielding opened his mouth to speak, but Bill said, “And as for the propaganda value to the Chinese, how do you think our fighting men and women will respond when they learn what the Chinese have done? Hell, Richard, I’ll be a fucking martyr, and their anger will be worth two new divisions!”
Still, the CIA director obviously had points to make, so Bill cut to the chase. “Look, we don’t know what they’ll do when I walk out onto that bridge, but we do know what will they do if I don’t. I intend to accept that offer by five o’clock this afternoon.”
Fielding lowered and nodded his head.
“So, there you have it,” Bill said. “That’s your answer. Take every precaution you can think of. Do anything you can to counter any Chinese dirty tricks. Get Vice President Simon back here to the White House before the 31st. But make the arrangements, and whatever you do, Richard, make absolutely certain that by five o’clock this afternoon you have communicated my unequivocal acceptance of the Chinese army’s offer.”
Fielding nodded with his lips pinched shut and his objections cut short.
“Now,” Bill said, the decision made, “tell me about Clarissa.”
The line of sick American civilians stretched from the door of the clinic down the sidewalk to the intersection fifty meters away. They were pale and gaunt. Women holding babies. The elderly maintaining their place in line while sitting slumped on the pavement. Shivering, sweating people with blankets draped over them.
Wu climbed out of the command car at the entrance. The bleary eyes of the Americans regarded him with terror. One, a tall man with a blanket covering his head, turned away. The civilians closed ranks around him, hiding him. Drops of blood dried on the white concrete beneath him. American Green Beret, Wu thought. Probably armed.
“You cover the front,” he said to the soldiers who piled out of the command car. “Stay here.”
Wu climbed the steps to the clinic alone. Inside, the sights of the crowded waiting room were pathetic, and the smells were sickening. The air was thick with vomit. Bowels. Foul breath coughed from diseased lungs. A nurse — an elderly African-American woman wearing a strangely fresh white uniform — walked among the patients with an old-fashioned clipboard, not one of the newer penboards. She didn’t need real-time access to insurance data. She simply catalogued their ailments, giving each a number. She was up to number 879.
“Where is the doctor?” Wu asked the woman.
Her hatred of Wu shone from her burning eyes. She seemed on the verge of spitting in his face, but she led him down a hallway filled with people and into an examining room. An old woman lay on the table. Her jaw quivered, and she stared at the ceiling. Her middle-aged daughter held her hand.
The doctor turned to Wu. He had a three-day growth of gray stubble, bloodshot, bleary eyes, and an apron stained with ugly yellows and browns.
“I want to ask your opinion,” Wu said.
“My opinion?” the man replied, his eyes glancing across Wu’s bandage. “Your hospitals are well-stocked with equipment and medicine. I’m down to a few samples that I’ve been hoarding for the seriously ill.”
“I want to ask your opinion,” Wu repeated.
After a moment, the man crossed the hallway into his office. Wu shut the door behind him. “Drop your pants,” the doctor said.
“What?”
“I can identify which venereal disease you have,” the American physician replied, “but if you need penicillin, you’re going to have to get it from Chinese army stocks. I’ve been out for a month.”
“It’s this,” Wu said, peeling the bandage from his face with a painful tearing sound.
The doctor eyed the wound from a distance, then turned on the lamp atop his desk and twisted it so that it shown up, not down. “Come here,” he said, motioning Wu forward. He donned reading glasses, grabbed Wu’s chin somewhat roughly, Wu thought, and turned his head to the side. With his free hand, he prodded Wu’s face, stretching his skin and causing Wu to wince. “No infection. They used adhesive glue instead of stitches to close it up. I didn’t know the Chinese army had plastic surgeons on staff.”
He turned off the light.
“Was it a woman, or a card game?” the American doctor asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Who cut you?”
“I was wounded,” Wu replied, shaken. “In combat.”
“Don’t tell me our guys are using sabers,” the doctor said.
“I was hit by a bullet. Nearly hit, I mean. It grazed my face.”
The doctor turned the lamp on again, and again took control of Wu’s head, turning it this way and that. He extinguished the lamp.
“Whatever you say,” was his response.
“What do you say?” Wu asked.
“About that cut on your face?” the physician replied. Wu nodded. “I say you were cut with a knife. Maybe even a scalpel, the incision is so narrow. You’ll have a scar, but not like the one you’d have if you’d been grazed by a bullet.” He reached up and pressed on Wu’s cheekbone. Wu’s head rocked back, and his cut stung. “That bone would be gone — fractured in a half dozen places — if a bullet had entered here,” he said, prodding the lower corner of the cut, “and exited here.” Wu withdrew his face before the man could hurt him again.