The White Vixen (6 page)

“The ship!”
The Taiwanese marine’s yell tore everyone’s attention away from the pursuing helicopter, if only long enough to see
Cambridge
’s murky outline on the horizon. So close. Jo turned back and fired another volley at the Chinese chopper.

The Hound veered off suddenly, and Jo wondered for a moment if she’d managed to score a hit. The thought was barely formed when she heard a ferocious ripping sound from overhead. Arrows of light flashed toward the Chinese chopper. Tracer bullets!

An instant later, the British Lynx swept past them, its Rolls Royce turbine engines screaming. The Chinese pilot had no stomach for this kind of fight, and the Hound turned back to the island, heading off at top speed, chased by yells of triumph and relief from the boat. “Cheeky bugger wanted no part of our lads up there!” Smythe shouted, laughing. “Could’ve put a missile up that Chinaman’s arse anytime he wanted.”

She knew the Lynx pilot had to be under orders not to bring him down unless challenged. The British were willing to do just about anything to get their valuable agent back, but a full-scale military incident was probably a bit much for them.

The Chinese, though, thought otherwise. A minute after the Hound’s departure, the Zodiac was within a few hundred meters of
Cambridge
when the orbiting Lynx turned quickly to the northwest. Jo followed it with anxious eyes, and then saw the dark shape of the oncoming ship against the graying horizon. There was a flash from the ship. “Incoming!”

The shell landed fifty meters ahead of them, sending a geyser high into the gloom. Smythe jerked the tiller, nearly pitching the exhausted Jamison overboard but for the grasping hands of the Taiwanese marine and Powers. Jo lost sight of the Lynx as it closed on the Chinese gunboat and fired a stream of tracers across its bow.

“What kind of ship?” Jo yelled at Smythe, whose smile of confidence had disappeared.

“Probably a
Swatow
-class gunboat,” he said. “Forty knots, top speed. Six machine guns, no torpedoes.”

“That was no machine gun round!”

“Right. They must’ve mounted some sort of heavy mortar on board. They’ll be very lucky to get us, but they could raise bloody hell for
Cambridge
.”

The Chinese gunboat ignored the Lynx’s warning and kept coming on an intercept course. Were they in international waters? Jo knew the Chinese frequently claimed much more than the standard two-mile limit. That would be something for the diplomats to sort out, if it came to that. She had greater concerns now, though, as the sleek gray lines of the British destroyer crept ever closer.

“I’m gonna make a run for the ship!” Smythe yelled as he straightened the tiller and twisted the wide-open throttle, trying to urge every last bit of horsepower from the overworked little outboard. “She’s making about three knots! I’ll try to get around her stern, get some cover!”

They were close enough now to see men running on
Cambridge
’s deck. Some looked to be readying a boat to be dropped. The ship was steaming roughly north-northeast, putting the Chinese gunboat about fifteen degrees off its port bow. Jo saw the four-and-a-half-inch gun of the destroyer’s forward battery swing to port, coming to bear on the gunboat.

The Chinese gunners sent a volley of machine gun fire toward the Lynx, which veered violently to its left to avoid being hit. Another shell leaped from the Swatow’s mortar, crashing into the sea only thirty meters from the Zodiac. The Chinese gunner was deft, putting his shell in between the Zodiac its mother ship. Smythe instinctively turned the boat to starboard.
Cambridge
’s forward battery opened fire with a violent crack, and Jo saw a geyser of flame and water erupt only twenty meters from the gunboat’s port bow, an astonishing display of gunnery.

The destroyer’s marksmanship had the desired effect. The Swatow ceased fire on the prowling Lynx and slowed. The British were probably sending warnings to its skipper by radio, punctuating the message with the gunfire. A semaphore light blinked from the destroyer’s deck. “Bring us around to starboard!” Powers yelled from the bow of the Zodiac.

Only a hundred meters away from the protective shield of the ship, Smythe turned the Zodiac slightly to starboard, swinging it around well to the stern of the destroyer. Jo’s last glimpse of the frustrated Chinese gunboat revealed it turning away to the west. Its skipper would have a lot of explaining to do, but probably not so much as if he had decided to engage a British warship in what surely would’ve been a short fight. For the first time in what seemed like days, Jo felt herself starting to relax.

Smythe expertly maneuvered the Zodiac toward
Cambridge
’s starboard rear quarter where a pair of rope ladders had been hung down from the deck. A sailor yelled something, and then another device came down, swaying next to the ladders. Jo saw it was a breech’s buoy, a rope-and-wood chair.

The destroyer’s skipper had ordered his engines to all stop, but the momentum of the ship was still carrying her forward at a couple knots’ speed. Smythe had no trouble matching that as he brought the game little Zodiac boat alongside at the ladders. Powers grabbed hold of the breech’s buoy. “You’re up first, m’lady,” he said gallantly to Madame Zhi, who gripped his hand and allowed
herself to be hoisted into the seat and strapped in. Powers gave a signal to the sailors on the deck above and they hauled the Chinese woman quickly upward.

“Let’s get the lad off next,” Smythe said behind Jo, who had forgotten for a moment that she was still in command.

“Of course,” she said, turning to the SBS commando. “Well done, lieutenant. You brought us home.”

A smile creased his face, splitting the dark camouflage paint. “Wouldn’t do to have the Yanks upset at us for losing one of their best, now, would it?”

“No, I suppose not.” She was about to say more, but a torrent of shrill Mandarin came from the side of the boat.

Madame Zhi’s nephew had panicked, struggling with Powers as the sergeant tried to get him into the chair. A British marine—Jo thought it looked like an officer—was coming down the near ladder to lend a hand. Jo crabbed forward in the boat. “It’s all right!” she yelled to the youngster. “You’ll be fine!”

“No! No!” The boy kicked out at Powers, who avoided the first blow but not the second, taking it on his left shoulder. He fell back down into the Zodiac with a grunt. The boy was halfway onto the small platform of the chair, eyes wild, and Jo reached for him as he tried to slide out of the chair back into the boat. Jo grabbed a wrist as the boy came out, but the swaying of the lift brought him a bit too far forward, and he bounced off the hard rubber bow of the Zodiac and flipped into the sea, pulling Jo after him.

The shock of the cold water numbed her, even though she’d been drenched with spray during their wild ride from the island. It was pitch black, and Jo fought against panic as she tried to gain some measure of control and stop her descent. She felt the boy’s flailing arms crash into her, and then one clamped around her neck, followed by the other. She gagged, forcing out some of the precious air she’d been able to inhale before going in.

Jo’s underwater training came back to her, and she quickly pried one arm loose by pinching the ulnar nerve at the elbow. But the training was so long ago, and she was so tired and it was so cold…The boy thrashed with his suddenly useless arm but locked the other even tighter around Jo’s neck. She felt her lungs about to burst, and then came a sharp blow on her head that made everything even blacker than before.

CHAPTER THREE

Estancia Valhalla, Argentina

November 1981

They seemed nearly without end.
La pampas
, the natives called them, the prairies stretching so many kilometers to the west, to the foothills of the distant and invisible Andes. The man gazing upon them now, from the veranda outside his office, knew them by that name, but also by another, seemingly less elegant name:
die Steppen
. His father’s name for the vastness, and the son knew that name, but also the native name, because in truth he was a man of two cultures, and many days, like today, he felt them pulling him this way, then that.

For perhaps the thousandth time, he wondered if it was it like this when his father and fellow countrymen first pushed eastward from occupied Polan
d, forty years ago, into Russia. As they looked upon it from their airplanes, their tank turrets, their troop trucks, were they awed by the vastness, by the challenge before them? No. They would have gone forward with apprehension, certainly, but tempered with the iron discipline of their race and profession, the confidence bred by years of triumph, and the admonition of their superiors that only inferior peoples stood between them and a victory unmatched in their nation’s history.

He looked down at the cognac swirling in his glass. Ah, but if they had only succeeded, he wouldn’t be here now. Where would he be? Perhaps in that very place now, enjoying the new
Lebensraum
bought with blood by his father’s generation, the living space seized from the subhuman Slavs and their Jewish masters. An industrialist, with factories belching smoke around the clock and churning out ever more tanks and planes and ships, or maybe consumer goods for the people whose sacrifices had made it all possible. Yes, they would be driving his Volkswagens along mighty
Autobahnen
stretching from the Urals to the Pyrenees.

Or maybe he would be a landowner, with thousands of hectares under his dominion, breeding horses and cattle, and people would give him the title of
Freiherr
, even if such appellations were archaic in modern times. He liked the sound of it, though. Baron Wilhelm von Baumann. It had a ring to it, as the Americans would say, especially when he added the formal
von
.

Yet he also liked the sound of
el jefe
, the chief, the title used by many of his native employees when they spoke to him. When he gazed out over the lands his father had amassed, and which would someday be his own—were his already, in all but name—he felt a fierce sense of pride. The call of the pampas was strong, and even now he felt his heart race from the memory of his powerful horse beneath him as they thundered across the prairie, the hot bloodlust that gripped him when he watched the
señoritas
dance the
chacarera
, even the pleasant tug of lethargy when he saw someone taking an afternoon siesta or talking about putting something off till
mañana
.

His mixed heritage could be a blessing or a curse, and sometimes he wavered between the extremes by the day, even by the hour. More often, he felt it was a curse. He knew, for instance, that if his father’s cause had been victorious, he never would’ve been able to take his wife back to his homeland. Although Anna Baumann’s heritage was primarily German, like many of her countrymen, it was not purely Aryan. She would have been considered below his station, and her Spanish blood might have caused her to be considered little better than a common Gypsy.

And with a shudder, he remembered what had happened to those people.

No. While he appreciated the charms of his mother’s heritage, the benefits of living in the country in which he had been born, he had always identified more with his father. Like most of his expatriate countrymen, Dieter had sought a wife with strong German roots, and almost without exception the children, especially the males, were raised in their fathers’ culture. A culture that had produced a warrior class so proud, so mighty, that their nation had come close to capturing the world.

But they had failed. No, that wasn’t quite true, he thought, remembering his reading, and the stories told by his father and his Kameraden, of heroism on the battlefield undone by political bunglers back home, fools who had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory even as the soldiers could see the onion-shaped domes of the enemy’s capital. Bunglers…idiots…some of the milder words he’d heard from the Kameraden about those dark days. And yet, weren’t some of those same men among the very group who had made those disastrous decisions? Willy knew from his reading that must be so, yet it had never been spoken of. Not for the first time, he wondered about that, about where the truth really lay.

In any event, he was here, on a warm November day, so many thousands of kilometers from where he sometimes felt should be: in the land of his father’s birth, on the continent that should be his now, his and his generation’s. Instead they had this one. A beautiful and bountiful land, to be sure, but with no history, no tradition. A land where Stone Age savages had built a semblance of civilization, but one so weak it would be swept away by a few hundred Spaniards on horseback. And what kind of legacy had those
conquistadores
built? Tinpot dictators who plundered the land and then hid from the people behind toy armies that wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the field against the
Wehrmacht
.

The glass door creaked open behind him, and he heard the tapping of his father’s cane, the shuffling of the slippered feet upon the wood. He turned to face the old man. “Hello, Father,” he said with genuine respect. Germany’s defeat had not been caused by men like Dieter Baumann, who shed his blood on the steppes of Russia and then came to this foreign land to work tirelessly for the Fatherland.