about?” Nolan shouted back at her.
She was trying to look in all directions at once, even though she could barely keep her head upright. She looked totally confused and totally out of it.
“I don’t know!” she screamed back at them. “I just know we’ve got to do it!”
“But how?” Nolan shouted.
She started looking around again—it was obvious she was making it up as she went along.
Then she pointed out to the harbor. “We’ll take one of those old ships,” she said excitedly. “There’s plenty of them out there. We’ll take one—and we’ll load these people on. And we’ll get them away from this horrible place!”
Nolan almost couldn’t speak. He started stammering. It was like she was a different person.
“But … but…”
“But what?”
“But that’s just too … complicated,” he heard himself say.
“Why?” she asked. “Why is it complicated?”
Nolan was completely flustered now. “I don’t know,” was all he could say. “It just is…”
She was furious—and crying—at the same time.
“I thought you guys were supposed to be heroes,” she said angrily.
Gunner started yelling at her. “Is this the part where you tell us you hit your head and can’t remember who you are?”
She swung at him again—missing again, but knocking them all off their feet a second time.
She roared back him, “For the first time ever, I know who I am.…”
They ducked another barrage of tracer fire, this one extremely close.
Nolan said to her, “Look, how about if we come back for them?”
“Come back?” she replied. “When? And with who? When will you get them a ship if not now?”
She never gave Nolan a chance to answer. She started screaming: “Bolay! Bolay!” to the startled people below.
Then she grabbed Nolan’s M4 out of his hands and ran back down the dune and into the Black Hole, yelling at the emaciated people to follow her.
Nolan and Gunner just looked at each other, totally bewildered. The Senegals were simply stunned.
“Elle est devenue folle!” one of them yelled. She’s gone crazy …
But Alpha Squad had no choice. They couldn’t leave her here.
So they ran after her.
* * *
Gottabang Bay
THE TAIWAN SONG was a general-purpose cargo vessel.
Seventy years old, rusty and devoid of paint, it was 510 feet long, with a bridge at middeck and ancient loading cranes front and back. It was of utilitarian design, built decades before the first appearance of the super-sized modern ships, and ordinary in just about every way.
It had sailed around the world innumerable times, but now its engines were shot, it was leaking in dozens of places and its electrical systems barely worked at twenty percent. Filled with asbestos-coated pipes, paneling like flash paper and even a lead-lined water tank, its Malaysian owners decided it was time to give up the ghost. They’d made a deal with the Gottabang cutting operation to have the ship broken for a payment of $150,000 cash.
There were only four crewmen remaining on board tonight. The captain had left the day before, taking a dozen hands to a new command out of Singapore. The four who remained, South Koreans all, would stay with the ship until the end, which was scheduled for shortly after sun up.
In fact, the Taiwan Song was first in line to be broken that day. When the call came from shore, the small crew would start the ship’s balky engines and rev them up to the highest possible RPMs. Eventually steering toward the beach at absolute high tide, they would force the old ship up onto the sand as far as it could go—and that would be it. Once the vessel reached the beach, it would no longer be considered a sailing ship. At that moment, it would simply be “pre-scrap material.”
Or so they thought.
The four crewmen had spent this last night up on the bridge, mixing coffee with cheongju, getting buzzed while staying awake. It seemed the right thing to do for this ship that would soon cease to be a ship. Most merchant sailors had gruff, hard-core exteriors, but many were sentimental about the ships they’d served on. These four had crewed the Taiwan Song for a long time. They were sad to see her go.
But around 0100 hours, strange things began to happen. The crewmen had just brewed another pot of coffee and were sweetening it with their potent rice wine when they heard what sounded like gunfire coming from the shore.
They retrieved their rudimentary night-vision glasses and the senior man put them on. The first thing he saw were fireworks—or what he thought were fireworks—about a