Danny nodded quietly. “Frank and I will take care of it. Let’s get to work.”
10
There are times when the Lord decides to try men’s hearts, and Calvin Hooks was sure that getting rained on in a muddy trench on some Korean hillside was one of them. His olive drab fatigues were soaked through, and while his helmet provided some cover, the metal was cold, chilling him to the bone. At least they had a sputtering fire, courtesy of a subtle spark from Tim Yamato’s Enhancement, which had only led the Colombian fellow to stare and ask more questions.
Of course, while Miguel’s English was pretty good, the whole concept of Variants was a tough one to manage. Yamato had leaned on a shared knowledge of comic books to get the point across, which had apparently led Miguel to wonder whether he could learn how to fly.
Wouldn’t that be nice, Cal thought. Maybe we could get a nice aerial view of things, track this Chinese boy down fast and easy.
But there was nothing fast nor easy about their mission. Without Danny to point them in the right direction, they ended up having to go from unit to unit, muscling in on interrogations of Chinese prisoners for any inkling of intel on the superpowered soldier who could change the direction of bullets. And always — still, now, even with Truman having desegregated the armed forces — Cal and Yamato had to put up with all kinds of white-boy grief. Never mind that Cal now wore the double-bars of a U.S. Army captain. Never mind that he had orders drawn up by Colonel Kern himself — or, rather, orders Kern reluctantly signed under orders from Washington. They were still questioned and hassled and given all kinds of static about how some “nigger officer” and his “gook sergeant” and “that wetback spic” were tying things up with prisoner transfers.
It took all of Cal’s God-given patience not to punch some of those crackers into next year. A couple times, he hadn’t even bothered to ask Jesus for forgiveness after getting short-tempered. Some of those boys deserved a good old-fashioned chewing out, and Cal had been around enough Army boys over the past five years to dish it out pretty well.
But finally, after a couple weeks of going from unit to unit, from POW camps to MASH units to rear-guard intel units and turf freshly retaken at the front line, they’d finally found a Chinese Red with something useful. Their initial chat under the watchful eye of Army Intelligence had led Cal to believe the boy — and he was a boy, probably no older than seventeen — had known something. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably when Cal started talking about “unusual soldiers” who seemed “blessed.” It had taken some doing to kick the intelligence officer out of the building, but once they had, Cal had asked Yamato to produce a little parlor trick, and a second later the Japanese American’s hand had been covered in flickering arcs of lightning.
The translator had nearly had a heart attack. The Chinese boy had spilled everything shortly after.
They still didn’t know the Chinese Variant’s name, but the soldiers had taken to calling him Black Wind — a rather impressive nickname, Cal thought. Black Wind had apparently kept his ability secret from the officers around him, but had nonetheless risen through the ranks because of his success on the front lines, going from conscripted private to full lieutenant in just six months. The men, of course, loved him, because all they had to do was come up behind him and fire away, knowing damn well that Black Wind would keep them from getting shot.
The interrogated soldier even said that he personally believed that Black Wind was secretly one of the xian—the Immortals of ancient Taoist belief, even though Black Wind himself said he didn’t really know and generally doubted it.
Then the soldier asked Yamato if he was an Immortal.
Yamato just smiled. “Maybe.”
That idea hadn’t sat too well with Cal, but from that point, it had been easy enough to get a unit name from the Chinese boy, including where he thought the unit had last been seen. Naturally, they were in the thick of it, right where the fighting was worst, but it wasn’t as though they had a choice. So Cal had taken Yamato and Miguel, thrown them in the jeep and, to Army Intelligence’s chagrin, commandeered the translator as well, a Korean fellow named Kim Park Song, who had been too damned scared to question anything they asked after having seen Yamato’s arm light up like a Jacob’s ladder.
And now here they were, at the very front lines, stuck in the rain, trying to keep a fire going and wondering just how to get across to the Chinese side of the line without getting killed. The best plan they figured on was, in Cal’s estimation, outright horrible.
“It’ll work, I swear,” Yamato said, huddling under his rain poncho. “I look Korean enough, don’t I?”
Kim looked him over. “Maybe so, if it is dark outside, but you do not actually speak Korean. Or Chinese.”
“But you do, Kim. So you’ll take the lead, I’ll stay back and stay quiet. I’ll even put a bandage around my throat so they think I can’t talk no more. We cuff Cal and Miguel here, tell ’em we took ’em prisoner, and that they have special information for Black Wind.”
Cal shook his head sadly, with a grim smile on his face. “What if that Chinese fellow made your face couple weeks ago? You were throwing the lightning around pretty good.”
Yamato smiled. “Well, that’s the best part. When I let loose, I tend to blind people. I figure he really didn’t get a good look at any of us. Plus, he was concentrating on not getting shot. Face it, it’s the best plan we got.”
“This is a horrible plan,” Miguel chimed in. “Just get me close enough. If I can see him, I can shoot him, and we can go home.”
“No can do, Miguel,” Cal said. “Those ain’t our orders, and it’s not something I’m interested in doing unless we got no other choice. We gotta try to capture him before we pull the trigger.”
Looking nervously at each of his new compatriots in turn, Kim piped up again. “So let us say that we get behind enemy lines and the Communists decide that we are telling the truth, which they will not. Let us say we meet this Black Wind. And even though he can do what you say he can do, that he can move bullets with his mind? Let us say we capture him. Somehow. We do not know how yet. But we do. How do we bring him back to the U.N. side of the lines? If they think he is a xian, then they will come and try to rescue him, yes?”
Cal shrugged. “We gotta give him a chance to defect to our side first. Folks like us — like Rick and Miguel and me — we’re pretty special. And I’d like to think we look out for each other. Plus, compared to what I know of how the Commies treat folks like us, I think Mister Black Wind may want to take his chance with us.”
“Hei Feng,” Kim corrected.
“What?”
“His name in Chinese. We should all know it, so we know who to ask for.”
Cal nodded. Honestly, it really was a horrible plan, and it was predicated on no fewer than three big strokes of luck even before Kim and Yamato marched into a Chinese camp with Cal and Miguel held “captive.”
Cal took some small comfort that, even if Danny was there, he wouldn’t have magically had better options for them, though his tracking ability sure would have come in handy.
“All right,” Cal said. “We’re gonna go across, hopefully find some uniforms for Rick and Kim here. Now, I would much rather sneak around and try to spot Hei Feng before we try to march into a camp. Ideally, he’s gonna go take a leak or something away from everyone else and we can grab him then. This little play-act you got going, that’s our last resort. And since we got no time limit, I suggest we load up on rations here, because I’d rather wait a week to get him quietly than give ourselves over to the Chinese.”