Stephen Coonts - Combat

That was a position that the Chinese would regret having taken, McGarvey thought with pleasure as he got off the elevator on the third floor. He crossed the hall and after he showed his credentials was allowed inside the sky boxes, where the translators worked looking down on the General Assembly.

Captain Joseph Jiying, in civilian clothes, jumped up from where he was watching the proceedings, a big grin on his face. “Good to see you, Mr. McGarvey,” he said. They shook hands.

“My friends call me Mac, and it’s really good to see you in one piece.”

“It was a little hairy there for a couple of hours, but we finally realized the error of our patriotic zeal, and we gave up. No casualties.”

U.S. Ambassador Margaret Woolsey had just come to the podium amid some polite applause.

“You might want to check out Chou en Ping. He’s the PRC’s ambassador to the UN,” Jiying said. He was enjoying himself to the max. “The poor bastard doesn’t know what’s about to hit him.”

“It’s not going to be so easy,” McGarvey said.

“You’re right, of course,” Jiying said, suddenly very serious. “Maybe it’ll take another hundred years for the mainland to recognize who and what Taiwan has become. Look how long it took before Hong Kong went back.” He smiled and nodded as a very large round of applause swept across the General Assembly. “But ain’t it great to win once in a while? You know, truth, justice, and the American way?”

Down on the floor Peter Shizong was slowly making his way to the podium, shaking hands as he and his UN-supplied bodyguards were completely mobbed by well-wishers.

McGarvey took a pair of binoculars from Jiying and tried to spot Chou en Ping and the Chinese delegation at their seats, but they had already gotten up and were marching up a side aisle for the exits.

He handed the binoculars back. “Gotta go.”

“What’s your rush, it’s just getting good,” Jiying said.

“I’m meeting a friend for drinks. And then our wives are coming up to join us.”

“Anyone I should know?”

McGarvey shook his head. “Just an old friend. A submarine driver. Good man to have around in a pinch.”

DAVID HAGBERG is an ex-Air Force cryptographer who has spoken at CIA functions and traveled extensively in Europe, the Arctic, and the Caribbean. He also writes fiction under the pseudonym Sean Flannery, and has published more than two dozen novels of suspense, including White House, High Flight, Eagles Fly, Assassin, and Joshua’s Hammer. His writing has been nominated for numerous honors, including the American Book Award, three times for the Edgar Allan Poe award, and three times for the American Mystery award. He lives in Florida, and has been continuously published for the past twenty-five years.

“The longer I live, the more I realize the less I know for sure.” That’s what my friend Quentin Kim used to mutter to me and curvy little Dana Martin in our Public Safety classes at San Jose State. Dana would frown because she revered conventional wisdom. I’d always chuckle, because I thought Quent was kidding. But that was years ago, and I was older then.

I mean, I thought I knew it all. “Public Safety” is genteel academic code for cop coursework, and while Quent had already built himself an enviable rep as a licensed P.I. in the Bay Area, he hadn’t been a big-city cop. I went on to become one, until I got fed up with the cold war between guys on the take and guys in Internal Affairs, both sides angling for recruits. I tried hard to avoid getting their crap on my size thirteen brogans while I lost track of Dana, saw Quent infrequently, and served the City of Oakland’s plainclothes detail in the name of public safety.

So much for stepping carefully in such a barnyard. At least I got out with honor after a few years, and I still had contacts around Oakland on both sides of the law. Make that several sides; and to an investigator that’s worth more than diamonds. It would’ve taken a better man than Harve Rackham to let those contacts go to waste, which is why I became the private kind of investigator, aka gumshoe, peeper, or just plain Rackham, P.I.

Early success can destroy you faster than a palmed ice pick, especially if it comes through luck you thought was skill. A year into my new career, I talked my way into a seam job — a kidnapping within a disintegrating family. The kidnapped boy’s father, a Sunnyvale software genius, wanted the kid back badly enough to throw serious money at his problem. After a few days of frustration, I shot my big mouth off about it to my sister’s husband, Ernie.

It was a lucky shot, though. Ernie was with NASA at Moffett Field and by sheer coincidence he knew a certain Canadian physicist. I’d picked up a rumor that the physicist had been playing footsie with the boy’s vanished mother.

The physicist had a Quebecois accent, Ernie recalled, and had spoken longingly about a teaching career. The man had already given notice at NASA without a forwarding address. He was Catholic. A little digging told me that might place him at the University of Montreal, a Catholic school which gives instruction in French. I caught a Boeing 787 and got there before he did, and guess who was waiting with her five-year-old boy in the Montreal apartment the physicist had leased.

I knew better than to dig very far into the reasons why Mama took Kiddie and left Papa. It was enough that she’d fled the country illegally. The check I cashed was so much more than enough that I bought a decaying farmhouse twenty miles and a hundred years from Oakland.

Spending so much time away, I figured I’d need to fence the five acres of peaches and grapes, but the smithy was what sold me. “The smith, a mighty man was he, with large and sinewy,” et cetera. Romantic bullshit, sure, but as I said, I knew it all then. And I wanted to build an off-road racer, one of the diesel-electric hybrids that were just becoming popular. I couldn’t imagine a better life than peeping around the Port of Oakland for money, and hiding out on my acreage whenever I had some time off, building my big lightning-on-wheels toy.

And God knows, I had plenty of time off after that! Didn’t the word get out that I was hot stuff? Weren’t more rich guys clamoring for my expensive services? Wasn’t I slated for greatness?

In three words: no, no, and no. I didn’t even invest in a slick Web site while I still had the money, with only a line in the yellow pages, so I didn’t get many calls. I was grunting beneath my old gasoline-fueled Toyota pickup one April afternoon, chasing an oil leak because I couldn’t afford to have someone else do it, when my cell phone warbled.

Quentin Kim; I was grinning in an instant. “I thought I was good, but it’s humbling when I can’t find something as big as you,” he bitched.

I squoze my hundred kilos from under the Toyota. “You mean you’re looking for me now? Today?”

“I have driven that country road three times, Harvey. My GP mapper’s no help. Where the devil are you?”

Even his cussing was conservative. When Quent used my full given name, he was a quart low on patience. I told him to try the road again and I’d flag him down, and he did, and twenty minutes later I guided his Volvo Electrabout up the lane to my place.

He emerged looking fit, a few grey hairs but the almond eyes still raven-bright, the smile mellow, unchanged. I ignored the limp; maybe his shoes pinched. From force of habit and ethnic Korean good manners, Quent avoided staring around him, but I knew he would miss very little as I invited him through the squinchy old screen door into my authentic 1910 kitchen with its woodstove. He didn’t relax until we continued to the basement, the fluorescents obediently flickering on along the stairs.