Where are you?

“Not far, I think, though I can’t say for sure. Where are you?”

Why?

“We’ve been looking for you. We want you to come back. We want you to come home, Isis.”

Is – is that all?

“I won’t play games with you. Rumor has it that you – you in person – are having a confab with some of the Republic’s heaviest criminals and traitors. The Colonel would very much like to find out where this is all going down.”

You want me to inform?

“I want you to remember whose side you’re on: ours. The wild cards’. These people are dangerous to our hosts. That makes them dangerous to us – all of us, hon. You included.”

She forced her breathing to a regular rhythm. She glanced back at the porch. Inmon stood with his great raptor head averted. The Khmer watched her with undisguised interest.

“I – that is, one of us, one of Mark’s friends killed Spoiler.”

“Don’t sweat that. Spoiler was a hothead. Haskell told us he drew down on Jumpin’ Jack Flash. It wasn’t Flash’s fault… Haskell’s fine, by the way. We got the infection in his arms under control.”

I am pleased for him. J. J. intended him no harm.

“We assumed that, or he’d be toast like Spoiler. Look, all is forgiven. Please come home.”

Mark led a mutiny -

“No hay importa, babe. His hand was forced. The Colonel says it’s a non-issue. Come back. We want you. We need you.

And you?

A pause, then: “Sure, babe, I need you too. That goes without saying -”

“Isis?”

She jumped, came up on one knee, turning. Belew stood behind her.

“Are you all right? You left the meeting pretty precipitously.”

“Isis. Just tell us where you are. You don’t have to do anything; we’ll come find you.”

She stood unsteadily, hung her head. “I am sorry if I have caused shame.”

“You’ll be a hero -”

Belew was shaking his head. “No. Indeed, I’d say you knocked their socks off in there when you busted Nguyen’s popgun for him. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better demonstration of what you’re all about if I had a year and infinite beer.”

“Isis -”

Eric, I love you. But she felt the contact stretch, and snap, and fall away into a void within her. She reeled. Belew caught her arm, helped her keep her feet.

She would not show him her pain. “What – what of what I said?” she asked him, stepping away and holding up a hand to forestall further help. “Did I pass that test too?”

He grinned. “With flying colors.”

“And you agreed with me?” For some reason it was very important for her to know these things. She could not imagine why.

“Well, I think you’re a little bit of a bleeding heart, it’s true. On the other hand, if the colonel and that commie hard-case Nguyen Number Two had their way, we’d have half the country after our hides. Just as you pointed out.”

“But that which I said about the bombers – you were not offended? I – aimed it at you.”

He shrugged. “Sorry. But it missed me clean. Special Forces were the hearts-and-minds boys; we saw how the populace reacted when granny and little sister got turned into crispy critters.”

She made herself stand erect, head up, shoulders back. She wanted him to know she was back in control.

“What of strategy?”

“You were spot-on. We need to soften PAVN up big-time. Otherwise they steamroll us.”

“Oh.” She had been prepared for assault, carping criticism at the least. Agreement caught her off guard.

“By the way,” Belew said, “Kim is half-blind from worry over what he did to upset you.”

“I am sorry. I -”

“It’s okay. I calmed him down. I understand; it’s just the time”

“That is a sexist remark!”

“Not time of month, kid. Time of day. Your hour’s almost up.”

She looked at him. “How can you know so much?”

“I do my homework. Now, git.”

Ten minutes later Mark staggered back into the ballroom. Belew had requested that he return after he came back to himself. The conferees looked up at him, then bowed their heads.

“Hello?” he said tentatively.

Bert the Montagnard stood up and shook his hand. “Please permit me to be the first to congratulate you,” he said in flawless Oxonian English. He had a gold incisor.

Mark blinked at him. He hadn’t even though the ’Yard spoke Vietnamese.

“What’s going on?” he asked Belew.

“Big news. The Command Council here has just voted your friend Moonchild in as head of the resistance. You’re her deputy and official representative to the Council when she’s unavailable.”

He stood up and slapped Mark on the back. Mark thought his eyes would fall out and roll away across the floor and under the table.

“But I’m not -”

“Yes, you are,” J. Bob said. “Congratulations. You always said you wanted a revolution. Now you’ve got one.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

The Su-25 strike aircraft – what NATO called a Frogfoot – began to rock in the ground effect as Podpolkovnik Sharagin lowered his flaps for landing. The stubby little Sukhoi, with its two jet engines set on the wings just outboard the fuselage, was not exactly a pulsing mass of power like its sexy cousin the Su-27 Flanker, but it felt light and inclined to skate compared to how it had handled on takeoff, with its hard-points crammed with napalm canisters and rocket pods for delivery against supposed rebel positions in the rugged Giai Truong Son.

And supposed is just the word for it, Sharagin thought. The People’s Army had a worse Vietnam War complex than the Americans did. Vietnamese officers remembered how much they’d dreaded American air-strikes, and so every time their patrols got fired up, they shrieked for air support. Which meant the lieutenant colonel and the ground-attack air company he commanded were running up a lot of time on their engines.

The problem was the rebels were probably smart enough not to hang around for the air-strikes to come in on their heads. Sharagin would have been that smart. The Viet Cong were that smart, like the black-asses in Afghanistan, where Sharagin won a chestful of medals to wear on the breast of his walking-out dress when he went drinking – like every pathetic soak in Moscow – and the dubious honor of this command.

Of course the People’s Army had not been; they gathered in vast Warsaw Pact-emulating clumps where the Yank bombers could find them, pursuant to the vision of that nitwit Vo Nguyen Giap, who based his entire strategy on building for a one-two punch: a massive popular uprising in support of the heroic Liberation Forces – which never materialized – and a single great standup knockout battle with the enemy, which worked exactly once, at Dien Bien Phu, and consistently got the Viets’ yellow asses kicked every last time they ran it on the Americans.

Of course the Americans finally beat themselves, and everybody called that turtle-headed old quack Giap a genius. Then the Vietnamese went into Cambodia and spent the last twelve years proving the Americans weren’t the only ones who hadn’t learned a fucking thing from the Vietnam War. And today’s People’s Army savants thought their current crop of opponents would be just as idiotic as they had been and wait obligingly for their nice napalm showers. Nyekulturnyy assholes.

The runway had been scraped in the red clay of a Central Highlands plateau and surfaced with perforated steel plating. Western analysts always went into raptures about the ability of Soviet aircraft to land and take off under highly vile conditions. Sharagin was proud of his ship’s ruggedness, too, but it didn’t mean it was fun to land on an airfield this wretched. The way you bounced around when you set down, you just knew a wheel strut was going to come jamming through the bottom of the plane and straight up your bunghole…

“Be advised runway damaged is not yet repaired, Kulikovo Leader,” the tower informed him. Only his passion for radio as well as other species of discipline kept him from cursing the Vietnamese controller out loud. The rebels had dumped a half-dozen mortar rounds on the runway’s end before dawn. Of course the holes hadn’t yet been repaired. Sharagin was used to the standards of Soviet Army Frontal Aviation – which was to say he hadn’t exactly learned to regard efficiency as his birthright – but these slant-eyes were simply ridiculous.