“And is that all you are?” Wu asked in almost a whisper.
She grew outraged, her reaction accentuated by a nervous system wired to the max with Colombian cocaine. “And what’s that supposed to mean? Do you mean do I fuck that wrinkled old sack of bones?”
“No,” Wu replied. He felt sad. Depressed. “That’s not what I meant.” His forehead sank to the bed.
Shen Shen blew warmly on her hand and lay it softly on Wu’s back. She nuzzled close to his ear and kissed him. Her hand roamed. Wu rolled on his side to face her, already becoming erect. She kissed him openmouthed as he tried to put his lips to her ear. When he broke free, he kissed her neck under her thick, fragrant hair. “Who do you work for?” he whispered.
She flashed him a pained expression in reply. He turned away. Her face found his and wore an even more insistent expression of apology. “Please,” her lips said soundlessly before they found his again.
She made love to him. He never moved. It took him a long while. As she labored frantically, Wu decided that she probably doesn’t work for Sheng, who had been in the field for over a decade. Shen Shen had Beijing written all over her.
When Wu came, they watched the movie.
Wu enjoyed it, laughing at the humorous parts and feeling moved by the tragedies suffered by the story’s hero. The one thing that moved Wu most, however, was the dogged determination of the young officer portrayed by Bill Baker. His character was pure Hollywood contrivance, of course, but that meant that it possessed in distilled form all the attributes Wu had been raised to admire. Bravery, of course, but bravery explained by the character’s sense of duty. Risk taking guided by purpose. Leadership in the true sense of the word, never asking your troops to do what you had not done first.
But there was also another attribute of Bill Baker’s film character that had not been instilled in Wu by instructors, but that had lain inherent in Wu from birth. Innate. Hard-wired into his nature. That attribute was compassion felt both for comrades-in-arms and for the enemy. Death and suffering weren’t depicted cavalierly. They had lasting consequences, measured by the emotional scars they left on the soul. The most intriguing thing Wu found about the movie was how the hero reconciled compassion and empathy with duty. Fighting and killing were shown not to be inconsistent with feeling and caring. It gave Wu hope.
“So,” Shen Shen mumbled, “do you think she’s pretty?”
“Who?” Wu asked.
“The president’s daughter!” Shen Shen replied, bounding up onto her knees and sighing as if impatient with his dodging of her long forgotten query.
“I don’t know!” he replied, dodging.
“You’ve seen her picture,” Shen Shen said accusingly. “You’ve watched news footage of her in army training camp. There are school pictures of her in her file.” Shen Shen shrugged, holding her hands to her sides. She then sank onto her stomach, nearer his ear. “It’s a simple question,” she whispered. “Is she pretty, or isn’t she?”
Wu rolled over onto his back, twisting the sheets tight around him. He stared at the mirror on the ceiling. Shen Shen had picked the Honeymoon Suite. “But what’s not so simple,” he said, “is why you keep asking me that question?” He looked at the reflection of his chest. It had more hair than was common for Chinese, a fact that had led many of his classmates to tease him. He looked at Shen Shen’s back. Each vertebra and rib stood out sharply beneath perfect skin.
She was chewing on the satin sheets. “Well, let’s see,” she said with a quaver in her voice. “Why would I be interested in that question?” She laughed, but her red eyes were moist, and her mouth hung open in a totally unguarded, unposed expression. “Who do you find prettier, Wu,” she asked in a whisper, “Chinese girls? Or American girls?”
So that’s it, Wu finally realized. He shook his head at her ridiculous insecurity, but then turned back to his reflection in the mirror. He looked Chinese, but his features were muted. Rounded. Pale. He saw what she saw, and he understood her question. To her, to every Chinese, he appeared to be straddling some line of loyalty. Torn between his two halves. But in truth he wasn’t torn at all. Or, at least, he hadn’t been.
When he looked back at Shen Shen, all he saw was her luxuriant hair. She had laid her cheek on her hands, facing away from him. Small quivers shook her smooth back. Wu rolled against her and held her. He hadn’t answered the question because it strayed too close to the conflict that had lain dormant for all his days. The conflict that now, however, he could no longer avoid. But in his silence she thought he had answered.
So she doesn’t know everything, the calculating part of his brain deduced. She knew about his current comings and goings, but not his history. Wu’s family had kept that a secret so closely guarded that her handlers hadn’t included it in her briefing.
For if they had, she never would’ve had to ask why he was interested in Stephanie Roberts.
The air was damp and cool. Words came with faint wisps of smoke. “Dawn’s comin’!” Stephon Johnson shouted from outside the bunker. His words echoed off the bare walls of concrete. “Burns! Roberts! Get out here.”
Stephie ached deep down to her bones. For ten days, they had been preparing a defensive line along the river: digging trenches, filling sandbags, burying cable, putting thick timber and earthen roofs over machine gun nests, building nine-foot-high walls of sandbags around mortar pits. Everything was designed to weather an unimaginable storm of high explosives and high-velocity lead. What in God’s name is coming? came the recurring thought as Stephie and her comrades burrowed underground. All Stephie had decided was that whatever came their way didn’t come in the name of God.
“Get the fuck out here!” Johnson barked in a hoarse voice. Stephie pushed herself up from her sleeping bag against the leaden force of gravity. Her face was molded into the rough texture of two dirty towels she had used as her pillow. The flat taste and smell of fresh concrete filled her mouth, nostrils, and hair. Stephie and John hoisted their weapons and headed for the lone exit.
Animal snored uninterrupted from the corner of the bunker’s single large chamber. Becky had cotton balls plugged in her ears. The five of them — including Johnson — were all that was left of the thirteen soldiers who had made their brief stand in and around the house on Mason Street. Stephie and John entered the passage into and out of the bunker, which always reminded Stephie of some mysterious corridor in an Egyptian tomb. The simple maze wound its way first right, then left, forming a reinforced-concrete “U.” The design prevented direct fire and shrapnel outside from entering the bunker through its opening into the trench, but it also created a sense that danger lay in wait just around the passageway’s next bend.
Before exiting into the fresh morning air, Stephie touched the wall for luck. The concrete had been wet when they had been assigned bunker 9G. In search of immortality, the five survivors of the reconstituted First Squad had written their names on the curing, three-foot-thick walls. As in life, “John Burns” was right next to “Stephanie Roberts.”
Stephie, John, and Johnson stood like hunchbacks beneath the lip of the forward, fighting trench. The forward slope beneath their bunker’s single, narrow firing slit led down to the Savannah River. The riverbank and cleared hillside were a killing field laced with mines and criss-crossed with preplanned fields of fire. Every night — from somewhere within earshot along the line — something or someone had come to a noisy, explosive end. Becky thought it was wandering deer, who unknowingly roamed their old, now lethal haunts. Animal bet it was luckless Chinese probes, which would explain the mortar-fired flares and thirty-second bursts of American machinegun-fire that usually followed each mine’s detonation. Regardless, all kept their heads low in or near the main fighting trench. No one knew what lay across the river. All the patrolling the Americans did was to their rear.