Arlington National Cemetery
USA
Jon Smith looked away from the young family crying over a flag-draped casket and instead gazed out on the tombstones gleaming in the sunlight. With the help of a quietly grateful Chinese government, his pilot’s remains and those of the other airman killed in the dogfight had been recovered. Both were being interred with full military honors.
Of course, President Castilla couldn’t be here—it would have been suspicious for the commander in chief to show up to the funerals of two men killed in yet another vaguely described training accident. Fred Klein was absent too. As always, he preferred to remain in the darkness.
And then there was Randi. No one knew where she was. The deaths of the people on her team—particularly Professor Wilson and his students—had hit her hard. She’d been last seen somewhere near the border of Cambodia and Laos, but since then there had been no word. Not that it mattered. She always reappeared eventually.
That left him, or more accurately what remained of him, to quietly represent Covert-One. Mixed in with all the other uniformed servicemen, no one would pay much attention to a lone light colonel leaning on his cane for support.
He turned back and watched as the flag was removed from the casket and carefully folded for presentation to the pilot’s wife. She would never know that her husband was directly responsible for saving the lives of millions of innocent people.
One day, many years from now, the incident would be declassified so that historians could write theses and argue about its finer points over stylish drinks in stylish bars. He hoped someone would also have the presence of mind to formally recognize the people who had died. In his estimation, it was worth a few taxpayer dollars.
Until then, though, Klein’s carefully laid plans for the cover-up were working. The crash of Prime Minister Sanetomi’s plane had been explained away as a bird strike, and the inevitable demonstrations by Japanese and Chinese conspiracy theorists had been quickly broken up by their governments. Asian newspapers were now dominated by pictures of Sanetomi’s successor smiling and shaking hands with President Yandong. Everyone seemed to understand that the xenophobia angle had been pushed too far, and compromise was beginning to carry the day.
Ito’s facility was sealed off and would remain that way for centuries in order to let radiation levels subside. When the press noticed the rather uninteresting fact that Japan’s nuclear storage facility had been abandoned, the government would provide a bland story about concerns over structural instability.
Greg Maple was in China searching desperately for any sign of Ito’s nanoweapon in cooperation with Chinese scientists. So far their luck was holding and he’d come up empty. The Chinese had restricted the area of the neutron bomb blast for miles in every direction and were calling it an accident at an underground nuclear energy lab. Of course, the world was suspicious that it was an atomic weapons factory but the fact that President Castilla was publicly backing the Chinese version of the story ensured that the controversy would blow over quickly.
The only matter left to deal with was Takahashi’s military. Prime Minister Sanetomi’s successor had provided the United States unlimited access, and the commanders of the self-defense forces had little choice but to cooperate. It would take years to sort out what had been done, how it had been done, and what it would mean to the balance of power going forward. What really mattered, though, was that Ito’s weapon appeared to be dead and gone. Smith was happy to let the details be handled by others. He and his people had already sacrificed enough.
Despite the cool weather, a sweat broke across Smith’s forehead and he felt his stomach start to roll over. It was a sensation that had become depressingly familiar and he had to concentrate to keep from vomiting. A few days ago, it was a battle he would have lost, but the intensity of the bouts was subsiding.
The ceremony wrapped up and Smith mixed in with the crowd as it dispersed, relying on his cane to keep him moving forward. The radiation sickness brought about by his exposure at Ito’s lab and at the neutron bomb detonation site had been one of the most miserable experiences of his life. He’d been assured, though, that the acute effects would be behind him in less than a month. Of course his chance of getting cancer as he aged had risen to near 100 percent, but he’d never really pictured a future of golf, rocking chairs, and sunny porches. A shallow grave and a bullet in the back of his head seemed a hell of a lot more likely.
That left the hole in his shoulder blade and his mending ribs. He’d been given a six-month leave to get his body back where it needed to be and had already started the slow, painful process. His physical therapist—an unflaggingly enthusiastic young woman who appeared to be well shy of her thirtieth birthday—had assured him that one day soon he’d be back putting the hurt on the Special Forces operatives he ran with on weekends.
Smith had to admit that he didn’t share her confidence, but in an effort to get her to stop referring to him as “Colonel Negativity” he’d decided to just follow her orders and try to enjoy the ride.