Cao jumped down from the truck, yelling at the men who’d driven them. Wells understood his frustration, but there wasn’t time. They couldn’t hide this. They had only one choice.
“Cao.” Wells grabbed the smaller man’s shoulder. “Tell them, put the cops in the truck. Leave everything else. Let’s go. Now.”
Cao looked around, nodded. He said something to the men and they threw the bodies in the truck as casually as if they were slinging sacks of rice. Wells stumbled over one of the corpses as he stepped back into the truck. The body was still warm. Practically still alive. Except it wasn’t.
The truck rolled off. Wells slumped against the floor of the cargo compartment and tried to think through what would happen next. Assuming the Chinese had any command-and-control at all, they’d discover the missing police well before daybreak. Two hours, say.
Li wouldn’t know exactly what had happened, but he would be able to make a very good guess. He would assume that Cao and Wells were trying to escape by boat. He would blanket the eastern half of the province, and the sea around it, with every soldier and ship he could muster. He’d declare a state of emergency covering the province and the coast, order all civilian boats to stay docked for the day. All China would be hunting them. They had to get off the mainland as soon as possible. Even if they could stay hidden somehow, Wells didn’t think he could last another day unless he got to a hospital. He felt flushed and weak, and his stomach was dangerously tender from the blood he’d leaked. A surgeon could fix him easily, he had no doubt. But with no surgeon he’d bleed to death, or die of an internal infection when the bacteria in his gut crossed into his bloodstream.
“Cao.”
“Time Square Wells.” Cao flicked on a lighter and touched the dim yellow flame to a stubby cigarette clenched in his teeth. He held out the pack. Wells shook his head, realizing that Cao hadn’t smoked before because he hadn’t wanted to give away their presence in the compartment. But now being discreet was pointless. Their hiding place had become a slaughterhouse.
“How far?”
Cao flicked on his watch. “One hour maybe. Hundred ten kilometers”—seventy miles. “No more back road.”
As if to prove his words, the truck accelerated, throwing Wells against the side of the cargo compartment. He groaned and caught his breath. “The highway goes all the way to Yantai?”
“Yes. Then east, twenty kilometers, Chucun. Boat there.”
“And the boat, what kind is it?”
The tip of Cao’s cigarette glowed brightly. “We see.”
Wells laughed. It was all he could do.
IT WAS 2:20 A.M. They’d made good time. The cove was a pleasant surprise, a narrow semicircular strip of white sand protected by thick trees. The boat was another story, not much more than an oversized rowboat, maybe twenty feet long, with a big outboard engine. It sat low in the water, its black paint peeling, fishing nets hanging off its hull, four red plastic canisters of gasoline tucked under the wide wooden slats that served as seats. A Chinese man, sixty-five or so, sat on its side.
Wells knew the Yellow Sea was flat, but still he couldn’t believe this bathtub with an engine could reach Incheon, three hundred miles away across open water. And even if it could, they would need twelve hours or more, with the Chinese navy chasing them. Suddenly their odds seemed worse than hopeless.
“No way,” Wells said.
“No choice.” Cao hugged the men who’d driven them, spoke a few words in Chinese to the old man beside the boat. Wells wondered what their helpers would do next. Probably ditch the truck as best they could and disappear.
Cao stepped inside, his plastic leg thunking on the side of the boat. Wells followed, nearly falling over as he did. Cao was right. They didn’t have a choice. In the distance he heard a helicopter. He sat down heavily on the wooden bench and rubbed the bandage that covered his broken chest. He felt light-headed and feverish despite the cool night air. He wondered if he could last even twelve hours.
The drivers and the fisherman stepped forward and pushed the boat off the sand. It slid forward easily, lolling on the flat waves. Cao jabbed at a red button on the side of the outboard and the engine grumbled to life. He turned the tiller sideways and they cruised into the cove. The men on shore waved.
“Cao, do we even have a compass?”
Cao handed Wells a compass. “Straight east. Easy.”
“Incheon or bust.”
36
THE C-130J HERCULES LUMBERED DOWN THE RUNWAY, slowly accelerating as it bounced over the tarmac. Not far from the grass overrun at the end of the 9,000-foot strip, its nose finally lifted. Inside the cockpit Lieutenant Colonel Paul Bosarelli exhaled. The C-130 was a sturdy beast, but he wouldn’t have wanted to skid off in this particular plane.
Nobody joined the Air Force to fly C-130s. But during eighteen years as a Here pilot, Bosarelli had grown fond of the ugly old birds, the four-propeller workhorses of the Air Force. They weren’t as sexy as F-22s or B-2s, but they were far more useful most of the time. They could endure massive damage and still take off or land just about anywhere. Besides hauling cargo and airdropping special-ops units, they worked as fuel tankers, firefighters, even gunships.
But Bosarelli guessed that in the five decades since the first C-130 joined the Air Force fleet, none had ever carried a load like this one.
And that was probably for the best.
THE TACTICAL OPERATIONS CENTER AT OSAN had received the first reports of the attack on the Decatur three minutes after the Chinese torpedo smashed the destroyer’s hull. With no way to know whether the attack was a one-off or part of a larger Chinese assault, the center’s director, Brigadier General Tom Rygel, had put the base on Force Protection Condition Charlie-Plus, the second-highest alert level — just short of Delta, which signaled imminent attack. Rygel’s decision was understandable, for Osan was the closest American base to China. The PRC’s border with North Korea was just three hundred miles to the north, a distance that China’s newest J-10 fighters could cover in fifteen minutes on afterburner.
Within an hour of the Decatur attack, Osan’s 51st Fighter Wing had put six F-16s in the air to join the two already on patrol. Eight more jets waited on standby. Of course, the sixteen fighters were vastly outnumbered by the hundreds of Chinese jets waiting over the border. But the American planes were so much more capable than even the most advanced J-10s that the Chinese would be insane to challenge them. Though the skipper of the Decatur had probably made the same assumption, Bosarelli thought.
While the fighters soared off, Bosarelli had nothing to do except drink coffee in the ready room and try to ignore the acid biting at his stomach. Ninety percent of the time — heck, ninety-five — he had more to do than the fancy boys. But at moments like this, he felt like a fraud. Against a fighter jet, any fighter jet, his C-130 was nothing but a flying bull‘s-eye.
Then the door to the ready room opened. A lieutenant looked around and headed straight for the table where Bosarelli sat. “Colonel Bosarelli.”
“Yes.” Bosarelli knew the guy’s face, though not his name. He was one of Hansell’s runners. Lieutenant General Peter Hansell, the commander of the 7th Air Force, the top officer at Osan.
“Colonel, General Hansell would like to see you.”
HANSELL’S OFFICE WAS in the Theater Air Control Center, a squat building that everyone at Osan called Cheyenne Mountain East because of its ten-foot-thick concrete walls. As he trotted through the center’s narrow corridors, Bosarelli wondered what he’d done wrong. Or right.