“How are you holding up, Knight?”
McCormick shook his head. “What a fucking mess. And the damn ship is going to get through anyway, after all that.”
“It'll get through, but Unit One has been all but eradicated. The best soldiers left in the People's Liberation Army, defeated by the last of the Knights and the mercenaries of the Lafayette Initiative. It will be great press when we tell the story to the world.”
McCormick said quietly, “I guess. But Douglas, Taleb, Jed, Priest, Brook, Grant… all gone. It's a hell of a price to pay.”
I sighed. “That it is.”
McCormick had not known the men as I had. He didn’t know that Brook had left behind Miss Hereford. Taleb, he died without ever healing from the loss of his family and fiancée in Israel.
Tiredly, I said, “I'd known Douglas for a long time. He was going to die on a battlefield someday. It just happened to be this one. The others were the same way, I think. They were not men made for peace.” A sad laugh escaped my lips. “Wars like this, they tend to force people to choose. And good people tend to choose the same side unless they're born in the wrong place.”
McCormick nodded. “And what about Captain Fong? The PLA hero fighting for his sons who executed Douglas in cold blood.”
“We didn't precisely kill all those pilots in their apartments in accordance with the rules of war. Do you think none of them tried to surrender?”
Looking down, McCormick replied, “That was different.”
I looked out at the ocean, reflecting the brightening sky with the coming dawn. “You have seen much more of war than I have, Sergeant McCormick, but I've seen enough of it. You want to know the difference between you and Captain Fong? You are fighting to keep people free. He is fighting to enslave them.”
McCormick looked back to me. “And what about you? Are you going to keep fighting?”
Gesturing to my legs, I said, “My active participation in the war is over. You're going to have to see it through to the end. You, Volodya and Dietrich. I will be in Australia, working to keep the flow of weapons and supplies open. The Lafayette Initiative will continue.”
McCormick's eyes flicked back to the sea. “Before you can go there, looks like we're all going to be taking a trip to Taiwan.”
I turned to see what he was looking at and saw the massive shape of a Pelican approaching rapidly from the southeast.
The Pelican took us on a looping flight path around Taiwan, landing a dozen miles off the eastern shore. From there, we were taken by a small cargo ship to the port of Hualian.
As McCormick pushed my wheelchair down the gangplank of our ship, we were met by four armed Taiwanese military police, led by a squat, portly captain.
"Mr. Cortez? I am Captain Yang."
"Pleased to meet you, captain. Forgive me for not getting up."
I didn't have to look behind me to know McCormick was rolling his eyes. Since being given my first wheelchair on the Pelican, I had made the same joke no less than four times. I had resolved that if I would be crippled for life, I had better not let my wheelchair become a crutch.
The young captain merely looked embarrassed. "I have been ordered to escort you to meet General Cho, Chairman of the Armed Forces. Follow me, please."
As we walked to the captain's car, I watched the faces of the Taiwanese on the dock.
I had, of course, been to Taiwan many times for meetings with venture capitalists, speeches at technical conferences, interviews for top engineering talent and the like.
On those occasions, the people I met had been hospitable, friendly, and eager. Their country had been booming its way through a third industrial revolution, one powered by fusion energy, built on the backs of a quadrillion nanomachines, and calculated by the first commercial quantum computers.
Now, though, as I observed the Taiwanese crew members on the ship, the dock workers and guards, they looked fatigued. Resolute, perhaps, but weary of the war that was grinding away their proud nation.
McCormick and I entered Captain Yang's car, an unmarked civilian vehicle, while Dietrich and Volodya boarded a second car. Once ensconced in the car and on our way, I said, "Tell me, Captain Yang, what do you think of the war?"
Yang's Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed nervously. "My opinion is not relevant, sir."
"It is highly relevant to me, captain."
Yang answered tentatively, "My older sister was an assistant for a Duan Enterprises executive. She died on the day of the invasion when a Chinese plane attacked a convoy evacuating Duan employees from Taipei. Four days later, my younger brother, a student who got called up with the reserves, was killed in the fighting in Taipei.”
I asked, “What are you telling me?”
The Taiwanese MP paused. “If we don't make peace soon, there won't be any of us left to rebuild the country. The People's Republic will fall apart eventually anyway. Better that we live to see that day than die for a lost cause.”
I said, “You know that the Americans are on their way, don't you?”
Captain Yang replied, “Yes, sir. My men and I have been directing the unloading of the equipment of their 101st Airborne Division from cargo planes landing at the airfield to the north of the city.”
“Doesn't their arrival give you some new hope?”
Yang shrugged. “The American navy was easily defeated by the PLA. America is not what it used to be.” Yang remembered McCormick in the backseat next to me and added hastily, “Of course, we owe a great debt of honor to Americans like you and the Knights, Sergeant McCormick. Regardless of what happens in the war, I will tell my grandchildren someday that I actually met one of the heroes of the Battle of Taipei.”
McCormick thanked Yang, but then no one knew what else to say. The ride continued on in silence.
Chapter 19
Our small convoy of two military police vehicles wound its way southwest for twenty minutes until we stopped in front of a nondescript apartment building on the outskirts of Hualian. Once there, Yang got out of the car and gestured for us to follow him. McCormick unfolded my wheelchair, and we were on our way.
Inside, we found two uniformed guards at the front desk. Yang said something to them in Chinese and scanned a security badge. The guard asked him a question, and Yang gave a crisp answer, a codephrase of some sort. The guards waved us through a set of metal detectors, and we walked on to an elevator bank. We rode the elevator to the basement, where we walked off to another elevator. This one went down another hundred feet or so, and opened into a long, sterile gray hallway.
“This way, please.” Yang led us down the hall a few hundred feet, then turned right through a double door. There, a small electric subway awaited us. The subway whisked us off. I have no idea how fast or far we went, but five minutes later, we coasted to a halt, the doors opened, and we exited to another hallway. We were challenged by another guard in Chinese, and Yang once again talked us through.
After walking a winding path through the halls for a few minutes, we came to a door with an electronic lock. Yang looked straight into a retina scanner in the door, and, after a moment, the door clicked open. Yang opened the door and waved us in. Though McCormick and I went in first, I heard Yang say to Dietrich, the last in line, “Good luck.”
We entered a conference room filled with senior uniformed personnel. They were talking quietly in Chinese, gesturing toward various electronic displays. The locus of activity was a professorial old man with thick glasses and a rumpled suit. He was poring over a touchscreen monitor built into the conference table and listening to the reports of the generals. One of his aides in a business suit tapped him on the shoulder and whispered in his ear. He looked up to see us.