“I will be here,” Mitchell lied, and it hurt. Good-bye, Rusi. He took his dinner, paid the cashier at the door — Rusi’s granddaughter, attractive but a Chinese national and too young for him, both factors preventing her from becoming a temptation — and made his way out to the street. He felt tired. Another friend lost to his job. That list was getting long.
What just happened? he wondered.
James Hsueh tossed his cigarette stub onto the gravel, where it glowed briefly in the dark before fading. The engineer slipped his wrench into his toolbelt, then fumbled for the diagnostic laptop that he’d left on the ground after putting another tobacco stick between his lips and lighting it with the last bit of butane in his Zippo. Last night’s storm had brought lightning with it and one of the flashes had struck a substation tower. It hadn’t worried him at the time. A lightning strike wouldn’t damage the equipment while the arresters were working. The surge arresters saved the voltage transformers, but the mainframe insisted that the power flow was now twitchy. He didn’t believe it despite what the computers insisted, and so he had to make a trip to the station to see the equipment for himself.
James finally admitted to himself that he really just wanted to be home. He didn’t mind the overtime, but there was a young lady in the picture now. He’d met Ju-hsuan at the Taipower human resource office the month before when he’d marched in to argue about a discrepancy in his paycheck. The woman’s smile had disarmed his venom in an instant. He hadn’t thought about anything else for a week until he finally went back and asked her to dinner.
The engineer stared down at the laptop screen in the darkness. Still with the power fluctuations, it said. He made a rude gesture toward the machine that refused to let him leave for the night and leaned back against the steel pylon behind him. He would finish the cigarette to buy time to think before he made another move.
The high-pitched sound caught his ear for a brief second. He looked around, then up, but could see nothing. The lights of Jincheng washed out virtually all the stars and the moon was absent. The substation lights prevented him from seeing most anything beyond the chain-link perimeter fence. Still, he looked back to the street beyond, trying to identify the sound. Nothing was moving inside the perimeter. He was quite sure that he was alone.
The explosion erupted fifty meters behind him at the other end of the substation, far enough that the structures between James and the compression wave gave some protection, but not enough. The wall of air was supersonic for an instant, then slowed and began breaking up as it passed through the now-crumbling obstacles presented by the substation. The part of the remaining wave that struck James blew out his eardrums before it picked up his body and threw him against the chain-link fence along with the shrapnel created from the now-shredded metal parts of the station. His larger bones shattered and his eyes were saved only because he was facing away from the blast.
The fence collapsed in a fraction of a second, and the engineer resumed his own tumble along the ground for another half-dozen meters. The largest of the flying razors had missed him while he was pinned off the ground, but a few dozen smaller pieces tore into his back and legs. Surgeons would remove them in a few hours in a failed effort to save his life. The pieces that would kill him were the six that punctured his lungs. He was fortunate that he wasn’t conscious to feel them ripping into the soft tissues in his chest cavity.
The heat came next, hot enough to curl the paint off the few substation signs that were bolted to the pieces of metal infrastructure still holding together. The exposed edges of the shredded pylons and equipment casings closer to the expanding crater glowed brilliant in a second as they turned white hot. The fireball, cooling as it rushed through the air, had dropped in temperature enough that the engineer didn’t catch fire when it reached his prone body. It was hot enough only to blister his skin and burn off the exposed hair on his head. It also cruelly preserved his life by fusing the cloth of his overalls into the open holes in his back, cauterizing the exterior wounds and saving him from bleeding out.
James Hsueh opened his eyes a moment later for the last time. He could hear nothing. He had just enough time to notice that the Kinmen skyline was entirely dark before the merciful pain knocked him unconscious again for the last time.
CHAPTER 5
Ambassador Aidan Dunne sat with his legs crossed, wishing, as he had daily for three years, that he could read the organized scrawl of a Chinese newspaper. It was absurd, he thought, that a Harvard PhD should feel illiterate. He’d spent exorbitant amounts of time and money on his education, and it galled him that he couldn’t read a local tabloid. As a boy, one of the sisters teaching at the Maryland Catholic school decided that he had “the gift of tongues” and had promised it wouldn’t go well for him on Judgment Day if he couldn’t answer the Judge’s final questions in at least three languages, including Latin. The nun had been right about his gift for languages, but the ones he’d studied used Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Chinese pictographs were incomprehensible, and the humiliation had finally driven Dunne to admit that, at age sixty-five, his mind wasn’t up to that particular task. He dropped the People’s Daily on the hand-carved cherrywood end table and held his poker face. His hosts knew he couldn’t read their language, but they didn’t need to know that it bothered him.
Dunne was a career diplomat, having spent the better part of thirty years living outside the United States and more than a few in some of the most underdeveloped, if not godforsaken, countries on the planet. His reward for it had been the deputy ambassador post in Beijing, after which tour he’d expected to retire. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the People’s Republic of China was a prized post in the State Department usually given to some favored donor to the sitting president’s political party, so Dunne’s nomination for the ambassadorship had come as a shock to everyone. But President Harrison “Harry” Stuart was in his second term and wouldn’t be trolling for campaign contributions again, which afforded him the luxury of picking people for their skills and experience instead of their largesse. The Washington Post and New York Times editorial pages had praised the pick as a tribute to the way the process should work, which had sucked what little wind there was out of the opposition. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee failed to dredge up any defensible reason to kill his nomination, and few senators were ready to vote against a man who was so obviously qualified and deserving. It was too good a chance to earn some political capital of their own, so they praised him on C-SPAN and confirmed him. The only senator who hadn’t voted for him had been out of town when the vote was taken. The only critics had been those offended that they didn’t get the job, and none were willing to say so in public. The job afforded Dunne and his wife a comfortable last assignment in a modern city and would guarantee a nice stream of moderate speaking fees during his retirement.
Dealing with the Chinese wasn’t always pleasant, but he couldn’t complain with their preferred venue. West of the Forbidden City, Zhongnanhai was a brilliant estate of lakes, gardens, villas, and office buildings that housed the highest levels of the Chinese government. Their version of the White House… or the Kremlin, Kathryn Cooke had once told him during his intelligence briefing before assuming the post. Mao had built up the place after the Revolution in ’49. It was a massive complex and, in true government fashion, was off-limits to the average citizen. More than a few of the commoners who were “called to Zhongnanhai” during Mao’s reign never walked out again. Dunne had no doubts that the security services watched him when he came inside, which was fine. He was not an intelligence officer, and whoever was watching for him to plant a microphone was wasting their time. He’d never been declared persona non grata before and he wasn’t going to end his career that way now.