Stephen Coonts - Combat

McGarvey motioned for Shizong to come ahead when Hanrahan stepped out of the darkness below and waved them on. Shizong stopped in his tracks, suddenly not sure what was happening.

“Get the van,” McGarvey called down to Hanrahan, keeping his voice as low as possible. He hurried back to where Shizong was about ready to bolt.

“I don’t know—”

“It’s okay, Mr. Shizong,” McGarvey said. The man was only in his twenties, and despite his intelligence, training and charisma he was still just a young man faced with a very uncertain and potentially deadly situation. “There’s a submarine waiting for us off Keelung. If we can get you aboard, we’ll take you to Honolulu. It’s either that or Beijing. But you can’t stay here any longer.”

The van, its headlights off, nosed out from the driveway.

Shizong looked at the van and then back at McGarvey. “Do you think that I can find some old Superman comics in a shop there?”

McGarvey spread his hands, at a loss. “I imagine you can.”

“It’s a present for someone,” Shizong said, and he motioned toward the van. “I believe that our ride is waiting for us.”

Hanrahan was holding the side door open for them. Just as they reached the van they heard gunshots from above, and again Shizong was stopped in his tracks. He turned back, and McGarvey grabbed his arm.

“We have to go now,” McGarvey said urgently.

“Those are my friends up there.” Shizong tried to pull away.

“And they’re also Taiwanese intelligence officers who risked their lives to pull you out of Xiamen. They’re buying us some time.”

“They might be killed.”

“Yes, they might be,” McGarvey said harshly. “So might we.”

Shizong gave him a look of genuine anguish, and McGarvey wanted to tell him: Welcome to the club. You now have blood on your hands like the rest of us. But he didn’t say it because it was too cruel, too without feeling or compassion. It was this business; it made people into its own terrible mold, not the other way around. Shizong still had his idealism. McGarvey hoped that it would last at least a little longer.

They clambered into the van and even before Hanrahan had the door shut, Preston took off down the hill like a rocket, the sounds of gunfire up at Lee’s mansion intensifying.

Harding was in the control room studying the chart. The water didn’t get deep for another five miles offshore, and the Han-class submarine blocked the way. There was no real contest if it came to a battle. But he didn’t think that the Chinese skipper wanted to start a shooting war any more than the rest of them did.

He glanced at the boat’s master clock. McGarvey had given himself until midnight local before he should be considered overdue. There was no way to tell what was happening ashore. Technically that wasn’t his responsibility. His boat and his crew were.

He grabbed the growler phone. “Sonar, this is the captain,” he said.

“Sonar, aye.”

“What’s our friend doing?”

“He’s still back there, skipper. Trying to be real quiet. But he’s got a noisy motor somewhere. Probably in his air-circulation system.”

“Any sign of the outboard?”

“Nothing yet.”

“How’s traffic topside?”

“That’s some good news, Captain. It’s thinned out.”

“Keep me posted, Fisher,” Harding said. He hung up the phone. He had to think it out for only a moment, then he looked up. “Come to battle stations, torpedo,” he said calmly.

“Aye, sir, battle stations, torpedo,” a startled Chief of Boat responded, and he began issuing orders.

“Load tubes one, two, three, and four, but do not open the outer doors.”

“Do we have a target, sir?” the weapons control officer asked.

“Start a TMA on Sierra Twenty-one. I want a continuous solution on the target, and I don’t want to lose it no matter what happens.”

“Yes, sir,” the officer said, impressed. It was the first time he’d ever heard the captain speak that sharply. But God help the poor sorry Chinese son of a bitch if he so much as twitched a whisker.

McGarvey watched the road from where he sat in the rear of the van. Traffic had slowed to a crawl outside Keelung because of a military roadblock. Some people tried crossing the fields in the steady rain to reach the railroad tracks, but soon got stuck because of the deep mud. Soldiers went on foot to arrest them.

“There were no roadblocks this morning,” Hanrahan said.

It had taken them more than an hour to drive the twelve miles from the Grass Mountain road. Time enough, McGarvey wondered, for the battle at Lee’s house to be finished, the house searched, and the PRC spies duct-taped inside of their car to be released and give them the description of the van? If that was the case, they would somehow have to bluff their way through because there was no turning back, the highway was impossibly clogged; and he wasn’t going to get into a shooting battle with Taiwanese soldiers doing their legitimate duties.

“What do you want to do?” Preston asked. “In the mood these guys are in it won’t take much to set them off.”

“We’re going to talk our way past them,” McGarvey said, an idea turning over in his mind.

“If they’re looking for us specifically, it’s going to be all over but the shouting once we get up there,” Hanrahan pointed out unnecessarily. They all knew it.

McGarvey turned and looked at Shizong who was hunched down in the darkness in the back. Their eyes met, and Shizong nodded and smiled. McGarvey turned back. “I’ll do the talking,” he told Preston and Hanrahan. “No matter what happens, there’ll be no gunplay. Understood?”

They both nodded.

It was another twenty minutes before their turn came. The highway was blocked in both directions, and there was just as big a traffic jam trying to get out of the city as there was trying to get in. Most of it was trucks trying to pick up or deliver goods.

A pair of APCs were parked beside the highway, their fifty-caliber machine guns covering both directions. There were at least five Humvees and a couple of dozen soldiers in battle fatigues, all of them armed with M16s and very serious-looking. There were two lanes of traffic in each direction, each lane with its own cadre of soldiers.

A sergeant and PFC came to the driver’s window. McGarvey reached over Preston’s shoulder and handed the sergeant his military ID, “I need to talk to your CO.”

The sergeant looked at the ID and then looked up at McGarvey. “Get out of the van, all of you,” he ordered.

“You’re going to be in a world of shit, Sergeant, if you don’t get your CO over here on the double. We have something here he’s got to see.”

“Get out of the vehicle—”

“Call him,” McGarvey ordered. “Now!”

The sergeant, a little less certain, checked McGarvey’s ID again, which identified him as a captain in the U.S. Navy. He stepped back and said something into his lapel mike. A minute later a young lieutenant wearing camos charged over, said something to the sergeant, and then came over to the van.

“Get out now,” he shouted.

“As you wish,” McGarvey said. “But there’s a friend of yours in back who wants to tell you something.” He pulled back and slid open the side door. His eye caught Shizong’s. The young man nodded. He knew exactly what he was supposed to do.

McGarvey and Hanrahan climbed out of the van as the lieutenant came around from the driver’s side where Preston had dismounted.

There were soldiers all over the place, sensing that something was going on, their weapons at the ready.