The guy who helped us aboard was going to be the commandant someday. He said, “Hello, Admiral,” to Grafton and ignored me and Molina.
I was wet from the knees down and in an unpleasant mood. Perhaps the fact that I knew we were all going to hell together in very short order had something to do with it. A man ought to be able to pick those he dies with. I had these damn stumblebums and Jake Grafton.
Grafton and Molina went into the little wheelhouse, and I went forward to where the gunner was sitting on a tiny stool beside his machine gun, which looked like an M-60 and had a belt in the breach.
The sight of that gun made me feel better. We were ready to kill somebody, sure as shooting.
I glanced at the gunner, who looked maybe nineteen. He had on an orange life vest.
“Put a life vest on, buddy,” the gunner said. “They’re inside.”
“Naw. I’m not going swimming.”
“I said put on a fuckin’ life vest, asshole,” the gunner snarled, “or I’ll personally throw you over the side.”
Everyone was having a bad morning.
I heard the motor throttle down. We drifted up to a thing that stuck out of the water on a wooden piling or post and had some kind of three-dimensional triangular thing on the top of it. The motors of the boat reversed, and we stopped dead right beside it. Jake Grafton came out for a look. He had on an orange vest, too.
The thing on top of the pole had four triangular pieces of metal welded together into a pyramid, which was turned on its side with the open end facing east. Another similar pyramid faced west, and one north. Nothing to the south. Jake Grafton inspected the thing, then made a motion to the helmsman on the other side of the glass, inside the little superstructure.
“What the hell is that?” I asked him.
“Radar reflector,” he said. “They mark the channels. Radar waves are reflected back to the emitter, and the reflector appears on a scope as a bright blip.” He went back inside. I tried to find a place to sit. Finally I sat on the inflatable edge of the boat. The water was pretty flat, so it was unlikely I’d fall in.
Five minutes later we were stopped at another radar reflector. Grafton examined it and waved the helmsman on.
The fog was getting thinner. The day was moving right along. I looked at my watch. Nine minutes before nine o’clock.
We went westward along the beach, doing all the radar reflectors. They marked obstacles, entrances to channels that went into estuaries where the developers had been busy, fishing piers, etc.
What he was looking for I didn’t know. Nor was I curious. I was waiting for the big click. I wasn’t going to hear a bang. Just maybe a little click, and I would find myself standing in an anteroom someplace with a whole horde of other folks, waiting for my turn to go up to St. Pete at the podium and go over the list of my sins. I actually had a pretty good list. I’d been a busy boy since I went through puberty. I didn’t know if I’d get into heaven, but in my favor was the fact that I bought Girl Scout cookies every year since I got out of law school. I hoped that was in ol’ Pete’s computer. Sins shriek and virtues whisper. He was more likely to know about the former than the latter. Preachers never talk about how great their congregations are. Nope. They talk about what sinners they are. It’s the human condition. Religion, anyway.
The fog was lifting. Visibility was up to at least a mile. We could see the radar reflectors on their pilings from a good ways off. Now the coxswain merely slowed and Jake Grafton stood beside the wheelhouse and looked at the reflector as we went slowly by. Then the coxswain poured the juice to the motors and we roared down to the next one.
I tried to remember any other virtues I might have. Something to tell St. Pete. A dollar or two here and there given to charity. A beer for an alkie. Couldn’t remember a single old lady I had ever helped across a street. Virtues … virtues … I knew I was light in the virtues department, but since I normally didn’t think about stuff like this, I didn’t realize how desperate the situation was.
Truth is, my mom could have done with a better son.
Zhang Ping was awakened from a sound sleep by the ringing of his cell phone. He heard the noise, had to look around for a moment, perhaps five seconds, until he knew where he was and what he was hearing. He rolled out, dashed up the stairs to the cockpit, picked up the phone and looked at it. Forty-seven missed calls. The phone was ringing now, though.
He turned it on and made a noise. More like a grunt. The fog was lifting a little bit. Several hundred yards visibility here. No wind.
A male voice speaking Chinese said, “Commander Zhang?”
“Yes.”
“This is Neptune.” Zhang recognized Admiral Wu’s voice.
“This is an unsecure line.”
“I am aware of that. The decision has been made to abort the mission. I repeat, abort the mission.”
Zhang Ping took a very deep breath and exhaled completely before he said, “Code Purple.” That meant the device was armed. “I repeat, Code Purple.”
The admiral didn’t hesitate. “Turn it Green,” he said. “Green! Acknowledge.” Green meant safety the device.
“I can only try, sir. No promises.”
“Yes.”
The connection broke. Zhang Ping held the phone in his hand a while, looking at the houses and little boat docks he could see in the diffused sunlight coming from an uncertain overcast sky.
Beijing had chickened out. They had decided not to detonate the device.
They had the right to make that decision, Zhang told himself. After all, it was their bomb, and if it went off, they were going to have to live with the consequences.
He glanced at his watch—9:37
Well, he had plenty of time.
God, what a waste! All the blood and angst, and Beijing chickened out.
Maybe he should just ignore Beijing and let the bomb explode. After all, what were they going to do? Court-martial him? He would be dead.
But … no. He couldn’t do that. He was an officer in the PLAN. Obey or die trying.
Zhang Ping got busy. He started the outboard motors, inched forward, put the motors in idle. Then he walked forward along the bow and raised the anchor, pinned it in its bracket. It was muddy, but so what? Once in the cockpit, he backed the boat into the middle of the little estuary, stopped all motion and let the boat drift a bit as he fired up the iPad and connected it to the radar.
He was going to go out into the York, go east and run down the bay toward the naval base, get the radar reflector on the scope, cancel the detonation order … then what?
Get out of the country, Admiral Wu said. Right! As if bodies lying all over weren’t going to get the Americans in a tizzy.
Zhang went below for a piss and the shotgun. Checked that the pistol was stuck in his belt, got into the seat behind the wheel. The engines were idling, the props motionless.
The Americans had had all morning to hunt for the bomb. If they thought it was armed, they would pay little attention to him in his Boston Whaler … but if they didn’t know, the Hampton Roads area and lower bay would be heavily patrolled to keep strange craft out. As heavily patrolled as possible in this fog. He would have no chance to get close enough to disarm it.
The truth was that he would probably be dead in a couple of hours, whether the bomb detonated or not; then none of this would matter. Those idiots in Beijing whose courage leaked out through their dicks could face the consequences.