Teddy decided to do something about his foot. He stole two yards of the thin rag they all wore over their faces at the breaker, stuffing it down inside his pants when the last whistle blew. Back at the cave, he rubbed a scrap of wood on a rock until it resembled the sole of a shoe, but with a bent piece sticking up along the back. He strapped his foot up so that it didn’t hang, and the wooden brace gave him ankle support.
With it strapped on tight, very tight, he could limp. Not fast, and it still hurt like a sonofabitch, but it was better.
Each day, he tried to pick up a word. Most of the other prisoners refused to speak to him, but a couple would. One, he suspected, was Christian. He’d drawn something on his palm, hiding it from the others, but Teddy couldn’t make sense of the ideogram.
How was “good,” or used like “okay,” to agree or say you understood.
Tway meant “you did that right,” which they didn’t say to Teddy very often.
Apparently boo yow meant something like “fuck, no” or “get out of my face.”
“No” was bu shi, with a sort of upward singing note on the bu and a dropping note on the shi.
He tried to figure out “thank you” so he could say it to old Lew, but no one seemed to say that around here. Finally he noticed that the husky guys scratched the table with two fingers when they got their mush. He used the gesture, and got rewarded with a squint, then a clap on the shoulder from Chow.
Chow ran Teddy’s level of the breaker. One of the muscular guys who got to sit on the cable spools. A mechanic. He kept the grinding wheels lubed and adjusted. He was always climbing in among the mill gears, even while they were in operation, reaching in here and there as if he didn’t care about losing a hand. He was already down two fingers. What were these guys in for? Either politicals or regular criminals, but he couldn’t figure which. His hutmate Thinh thought they were politicals, that this had been a re-education camp, but admitted he wasn’t sure.
Then one day Chow wasn’t there anymore. Teddy asked Lew where he’d gone. “Na-li shi Chow?”
Lew just looked away.
And the days passed.
There was no clock, only the whistle. No news. No calendar, so he didn’t know what day or even what month it was. Just that it kept getting colder, and now and then fine icy crystals drifted down.
It was too dry to really snow. But their piss froze in the plastic buckets, and they shivered all day long. They scavenged anything that would burn: paper, broken shovel handles, dead grass.
One evening Fierros whispered, staring into the dying fire, “We have to get out of here.”
No one said anything for quite some time. Until the pilot added, “It doesn’t matter where. Probably just out there to die. But we’re gonna die in this shithole anyway.”
Teddy slumped against the cave wall, massaging his leg. He’d kept falling down all afternoon. Each time, the unit leader had kicked him back to his feet.
This wasn’t the first time they’d discussed escape. He and Pritchard had talked it over on and off since they’d arrived. Each time, they’d concluded it might be possible to get up the bluffs and over the wire. But what lay outside? Desert, mountain, hostile locals?
“You heard the wolves howling out there,” Pritchard observed. “We leave the wire, mates, what do we do about them?”
Teddy slid closer, until the embers scorched his knees. But his ass was still freezing. “It’s not time yet,” he muttered. “The war’s got to be over someday. It’s got to be.”
“How long do we wait?”
“As long as they’re feeding us, we stay.”
Fierros muttered, “And when they stop?”
Teddy blinked into the dying glow. Took a deep breath, and let it out.
“Then it’ll be time to go.”
31
The morning was bright as silver, cool and still. The flat, hazy sea lay dimpled only here and there with the nearly exhausted echoes of distant swells, tinted rose, and scarlet, and gold.
The sun grew from the horizon first as a suspicion, a glow; then blinking suddenly into existence like a great golden eye, lentil-shaped, quivering. Droplets of gold ran up to join the upper limb until it birthed from the placental sea, snapping into a deep-red, quivering sphere, crossed with bands of white gold, gold, rose, and bloody crimson.
On the bridge wing, Dan lowered his binoculars, blinking away coruscating afterimages. Far on the southern horizon, the dark mote of Curtis Wilbur. He’d pulled her in closer the night before, once they had air cover.
Beneath the granite-seam of fatigue he still felt nauseated, but no longer so afraid. Guam lay ahead, after a tense and agonizingly slow twelve-hundred-mile passage. The formation was speed-constrained to conserve fuel, and he’d spent a full day searching where the battle group had gone down. But found only debris and empty sea. A pile of recovered flotsam lay under tarps on the fantail. Wilbur had been attacked by a submarine, but spoofing gear had pulled the torpedoes off track. The destroyer had gone in to prosecute, and the crackle of collapsing bulkheads was probably still reverberating in the deep sound layer.
Against the odds, they’d come through. The contrails had etched the darkling sky the evening before. Bombers, heading west for Taiwan and Korea. Transports, headed east, though most of the U.S. garrison on Okinawa had evacuated to the Japanese home islands. Savo would reach port that afternoon.
But Fleet had sent a messenger ahead. “Hopscotch incoming.” The OOD pointed. Dan got his glasses on it. Heavy-bodied, high-winged, it grew rapidly into a small seaplane.
“Call away for boat transfer,” Dan told him. “Tell the special agent to report to the boat deck. Have somebody help with her gear.” He’d thanked her the night before, saying how much he and the crew appreciated her efforts. And Ar-Rahim had seemed, for a moment, to relax that obstinate vigilance. She’d apologized for suspecting him, and shaken his hand with what looked like genuine, if still wary, respect.
The plane made a pass, waggled its wings, and reported in. Dan checked with Sonar and Combat, then cleared it for landing. It came in skimming the purple sea, throwing up a roostertail. Smaller than he’d expected, and painted bright colors. Some civilian island-hopper, commandeered at the start of hostilities. Savo’s remaining inflatable bounded toward it like a skipping stone.
“Captain? Morning traffic.”
Branscombe, with the clipboard. Dan climbed into his chair and flipped through it. Trying to impress into a tired brain that, behind them, the Western Pacific had changed.
The Koreans were fighting fiercely. China was consolidating its hold on Taiwan, imprisoning thousands in makeshift camps. More troops were still streaming across from the mainland. But that fighting, though lessening in intensity, wasn’t over. Some units had fallen back into the mountains, holding out in prepared redoubts.
The Philippines had neutralized itself. Manila had renounced all claims in the South China Sea, and offered to cede the still-occupied Itbayat Island as well in return for a nonaggression pact. Beijing had announced it welcomed this acknowledgment of the Empire’s supremacy, but might have further demands.
“The Empire?” Dan muttered, incredulous.
“That’s what Zhang’s calling it now. According to some translators. The People’s Empire of China.”
He glanced to where the boat was heading back. The seaplane was gathering speed, lifting off for its return trip. He grunted, and read on.… India was debating Zhang’s proposal. Japan had recalled its navy to home ports, and accepted the offer of a cease-fire in place in the Senkakus. Only Vietnam and South Korea seemed game to fight on. But the Koreans were isolated, with no access to the outside world. Jung’s fleet had retreated east, announcing its intention to fight on at the side of the U.S. Navy.