Nancy Caliber hated the ocean; she hated sailing and ships almost as much as she hated people. Below the hull, endless depth, restless and, in every sense of the word, beneath her. Ships were meant for pilgrims, not leaders. Born on one or not, every rolling deck was a coffin ready to close. At times the thought swallowed her, consuming her like waves that drowned all motivation.
So she built her own routine: pull-ups on bulkhead struts, sprints down the ship’s narrow veins, pushups until her shoulders sang with fire. That morning, the map of Vietnam lay pressed beneath her cheek—creased and trembling, held fast by grease pencils anchoring its corners like ritual stones. With each repetition, she traced the ridges and valleys with her breath, the terrain shifting in sync with her motion. Every drop of sweat struck the paper like a signature—two birds felled with one flight: war and discipline, indivisible.
Before the knocks came, the odor seeped through the door like a smug ghost—rich, oily, and insistent. Her face winced, but she just didn’t care to respond. Defined arms, quivering beneath the weight of her petite frame, held her unwavering devotion. There was a second set of knocks, which drew a narrowed expression and a curled lip. Instead of a third, there was a squeaking from the dogging mechanism, and the hatch creaked open, then moaned to a stop, and boot stepped past her face. “Figures I’d find you here.” He spoke ‘The Queen’s English’.
Nancy was not distracted; “I’m not done yet.” She finished her repetition. “You can take a seat.” The room hissed with her breath. “Over there.” Her nose pointed the way.
It was the same chair it always was, metal-backed and uncomfortable. Same as all the rest, just about the only thing in each room that wasn’t bolted to the deck. “You’re not going to believe this — well, er, you’re not going to want to hear —CRD saved its budget from your claws, once again. I don’t see why you chose to bring the hammer down after they got their ringer.” He’d taken his seat, sifting through the documents on the adjacent desk. “You said she was the person to hire, it’s not like you shouldn’t have expected some sort of progress…”
Nancy’s breathing was steady. “I did.” The words hung in the air until she finally stood to her feet, snatching her towel from the mattress, blotting sweat from her brow and armpits. “All of you, you’re predictable.” Her accent was thicker than usual. “It offends me, all of you are okay with wasting money on those stupid experiments. I think she’s full of it, and I’m starting to think some of you might be in on it. Those doctors, the scientists too, they should all be out in the field, with our agents and operators. Where the real work is being done, not locked away in their labs. They’re basically to useless to us.” She looked the man now in his eyes. “You’re right, I didn’t want to hear it. But I expected as much.”
The room was nothing more than a 12 by 12 box: a bed, a couple of nightstands, a couple of wardrobes, a bureau, and a desk by the portal. And of course, one chair. Nancy face twisted; she leaned forward, snatching the documents from his fingertips, sprinkling them across the bed before barking, “Well? Out with it, Edgar! You didn’t come down here just to piss me off, I’m assuming! You know, eight weeks out to sea? That changes a person, Ed!” Her eyes were wide as she planted her feet by the door.
Edgar reached into his pocket and pulled a document of his own, folded longways. “Matter of fact, I do have something for you. This morning’s briefing. Sydney wasn’t the only call we got. Walsh called me too. That just came over the wire.” He tossed the paper to the bed, pulling a cigar from his pocket, tucking it between his lips, then patted his chest and pants for a light. “He says he can’t confirm what it is or what it does, but it’s all the Soviets are talking about in the shadows. And they say it’s here.”
Out the portal, a gull swooped past, drawing her attention to the horizon. Structures. She made her way to the window to confirm her observations.
“That’s the other thing I meant to tell you,” he struck a match and lit his stogie, “We should make port by nightfall.” When normally less than a drag would be all she’d allow, today he brought good news with him. Refusing a smile, she pulled a bottle and two glasses from her desk and poured them each a drink.
Across the room, one nightstand served as Nancy’s seat while she dragged the second to make a footrest. “So, run this by me again, before we run this by all of them,” she motioned out the door, gripping the whisky glass firmly, “we don’t know what it is or what it does, exactly; nor do we know what it looks like — but we know it exists, and—” Edgar braced for impact, studying the obvious adjustments to Nancy’s body language. The conversation went sour every time the mission details came up. “Yup, I know what you’re gonna say. I get it.”
“Well, help me to get it, just humor me one more time before we drag our asses all over that country on a wild goose chase! Just help me to understand why we — really me, why I — care, can you do that? Is that too much to ask for?” She threw the shot back and beckoned to Edgar for the bottle; airborne within seconds.
“It’s the money trail. If it were wild talk, speculation, and rumors, I’m sure that nobody would give a damn. But there are millions invested in this, Nancy. Millions exchanging hands between the Soviets, the Chinese, and the rest of the communists — the US wants to shut it down.”
“That’s well and good, all that tracks I suppose; why do we have to be here? If this is the United States’ ‘big bad wolf’, why do they need our help?”
Edgar was nursing his drink, savoring the taste of his cigar, answering on an exhale, “Well, they assume it would be bad for business for us too. Sort of the ‘enemy of my enemy’ routine…?” Edgar adjusted in his seat to look out the portal briefly before turning back to Nancy.
“That’s another thing that pisses me off with all of you. These damn presumptions. Bad for business?” She took a shot and replenished it. “Bad for whose business? If they only knew. Ha! Maybe they do know? They have to know, I mean, why else are they sticking us with two units? We don’t need babysitters. We’ll. Maybe we do…” Only the hum of the ship filled the silence.
“What do you want to do, Commander?” Edgar awaited, fingers laced behind his head, which was cocked, smugly.
Nancy called the shots. On this ship, on dry land, if Caliber or any of its subsidiaries were to land on the moon, she would have the last word about what they would name it. “Walsh thinks this thing is worth it….?”
“Yeah, very much so.”
“Huh, well I always said that plane crash rattled his brain.” She killed the corner of her glass, taking the next swig from the bottle. “I guess, let’s run down the plan and rally the boys.”
The vessel was a small city; a floating fortress on the surf. It rode the shelf currents like an indifferent beast, her true purpose hidden beneath crates stamped with legitimate consignees—spare engine parts, canning equipment, pallets of sugar—and under those crates, carefully coded, sat the real freight. Nancy knew the manifest by heart; she had rewritten it three times to foil every ledger search the men at Langley might run. She had slept in shifts on the wardroom floor, waking to the rhythm of pumps and the faint, steady thump of the auxiliary generator as radios leaked the latest SIGINT from Havana and the steppes.
Two months at sea had given them time to turn raw intelligence into a plan that looked like inevitability. Caliber’s analysts folded Communist transit logs and intercepted telexes into a single timeline. Something was there. To the trained eye, there was no doubt about that, but what could be so valuable that these lengths of secrecy had to be taken? Nancy and Edgar had given the CSS Operators an hour to meet down in the holds for this briefing, which were often surgical, if Nancy was leading them.
“If you’ve been on one of my teams, whether that be to Vietnam or elsewhere, you would know by now that you are hand-selected by me to be here.” Her steps through the crowd of men were measured as she stopped between them, scanning their faces. “I consider you to be 35 of the brightest operators in the CSS, each of you is worthy of ascending to the ‘100’ one day. So, I want you to hear me when I tell you this is not an—“ her eyes found Edgars in the crowd, shooting him a dirty look “—easy mission to break down.”
Edgar stepped forward, holding a manila folder. “I’m going to explain the easy parts first.” She pulled the documents, and he stepped back into the crowd. “You’ve each been assigned an identity. We are blending into the ‘Da Nang wood-work’. All of you have been undercover before, some of you here in Vietnam. A few of you have active covers now. A lot of friends in high places. That’s good. This mission is not the mission you want to blow your cover on.” The men found their assigned packets from the stack, reading through them as they listened.
“You need to have those dossiers memorized by the time you leave this room. At nightfall, the ship will make port. We’ve arranged for you transports to your places of business; there you will find the details regarding your roles in this…” she hung her head. “Operation.”
The men stood, awaiting to be dismissed. Engines chugged and huffed as Nancy searched for the words. “As far as why we are here, well. Well. That’s the hard part. We are here to retrieve, presumably, a weapon of some kind. The rumor is it will revolutionize warfare as we know it, but… …we have no clue what it is or what it looks like. It’s imperative that none of you blow your covers before we can obtain enough detail to track it down.” The eyes of the men didn’t gloss over nearly as much as she expected.
“We’re being deployed with 2 US military units: the 101st Army Airborne and HMM-164, a Marine Squadron. They are to be kept in the dark regarding our role in this operation. My orders to you, gentlemen: you will not kill a single Vietnamese national, civilian, or soldier, while we are here; Vietcong or otherwise. You will not do anything to jeopardize Caliber’s diplomatic ties or corporate connections through the course of this mission. The soldiers have orders to kill. I, and Executive White,” she motioned to her colleague, raising his hand from among the crowd, “will do our best to run interference between the two of you. I don’t want the US to even know your real identities. If you are involved in an altercation with the US personnel — agents in the field or soldiers assigned to our detail— you are to do everything in your power to resolve it diplomatically, and if that fails…” She shrugged.“Well, the soldier’s life is forfeit.”
She dissected their daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms with calculated precision, mapping each expectation against the ghost of past operations. Contingency plans, cache sites, informant lairs—fragments of a long game played in shadows. The fronts were in place: construction crews, rice brokers, a seafood packing plant in Da Nang. Each one a mask, each one a lever. Caliber had laid the groundwork months—years—before the first boots hit the ground. Through these facades, operators had been embedded, loyalties purchased, and a supply chain disguised as routine commerce had been rewired into a covert relay. The system was live. The mission was breathing. And no one disobeyed orders. Not in Caliber. Not ever.
Nightfall descended on the harbor, and the vessel docked. Port authority and local law enforcement performed their routine inspections, finding funding in all the usual hiding places before flagging the ship as safe and going ashore. Cranes swiveled to life, slowly offloading the freighter, dropping large containers onto flatbeds, who departed for their next destinations. With a systematic precision, every two minutes or so another container would be removed from the vessel and fastened to a truck.
The trucks drove their scheduled early morning routes, leaving the harbor and dispersing into Da Nang and the surrounding countryside. All of them had unique destinations and even more unique cargo.
Nancy held a cloth over her mouth and nose, fighting nausea. The roads, evidently, were not the smoothest in the port city, bumping along with containers sliding on hard corners. There was only darkness and the stench of fish, in various stages of thaw.
From somewhere in the cargo hold, Edgar gagged. “Oh! The smell! I thought it was supposed to be frozen?”
She didn’t answer. They weren’t supposed to be speaking. The irony wasn’t lost on her; correction was in order, but it wasn’t necessary yet. After all, this was his plan. Every operator needed to be smuggled into the country; this was standard CSS infiltration.
Edgar groaned again. “Oh, who’d eat this rotting fish anyway? What kind of practice is it to transport rotting fish? Is this one of our corporations? While we’re here, you should really —”
“Shut up, Ed!” Her snap was brief through her cloth.
Faint dry heaving and retching were barely audible above the engines and the hiss of the brakes. Chains scraped, the latch popped, and light filled the cargo bay as the roller doors ascended. In moments, Edgar was on the loading dock, hands on his knees as he fought back vomit.He stood upright, taking in a deep breath, and gagged. “Why can’t I escape this wretched stench?!”
“It’s a seafood processing plant, Ed! I swear, you don’t know your own plans! You were British Special Forces?”
“I was SAS, not British Special Forces, what of it, though?”
Blank expressions on Nancy’s face were common. She shook her head, proceeding into the plant. Down 3 flights of stairs was a room behind a vaulted door, in a large safe; all requiring biometrics. It was accessible only to the 100 and select operators. This would be central command for this portion of the mission.
“Later today, 08:00, the operators will be reporting for their ‘orientations’ across the city.” Nancy powered on a large console, and a monitor glowed back. After a few flicks of the wrist, after flipping some switches, and the rotation of two dials, the image divided into several security feeds. She crossed the room, powering on devices, and the room began to hum and vibrate. “When do we meet the soldiers?”
In his arms were stacks of journals that he was now sifting through and reordering. “Uh, wait, here it is. We have a 06:00 rendezvous, north of the city…”
“06:00? That—“ Nancy searched the walls for a clock. “That’s an hour from now!” She cut a glance back to Edgar, but all she got back in return was a deep yawn.
#
“So, how deep does all of this go?” The two sat in the backseat of a dark sedan, winding through narrow roads, dense with growth. “Is he in on it, too?” Edgar, grinning, pointed to the driver whose chair was slid all the way forward. He squinted through the windshield into the dark.
“Damn it, Ed, why do you have to talk so much?” Her eyes were trained on the dark road, ever so often looking over at the driver to make a face of concern.
“I’ve never been ‘hand selected’ by the boss before. You’ve done, what, 2 - 3 other assignments here for the CSS since the start of the war?” It was a question she knew the answer to.
“As did you, right? Who do you think selected you to go each and every time? Would you have rather been back in Princeton, with Billings?”
Ed didn’t take the bait, glancing cheekily. “Hmm. Yes, but see, back to my point. Me and the other executives never knew you were here. Hell, this whole operation you got going —”
She gripped the back of the seat in front of her. “We have these,” she held her breath as the car took a sharp right turn, then steadied, “ establishments all over the world. Literally, I mean, you went and set up similar infrastructure: Cuba, I know, I sent you there, Bolivia, all down in South America.” The car abruptly braked, forcing everyone to slide forward just a bit, before they were all sucked back into their seats.
“That’s true. I guess I’m just trying to figure out what exactly I was chosen for. I’m not exactly a warrior. I’m sent in to deal with technology mostly.”
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Nancy smiled. “That’s why I let you call the shots. I assure you, you’re absolutely obnoxious to me. The sound of your voice, I don’t know, it angers me. But we are looking for technology, and so you seem to be good at identifying that effectively, and you know you way around the books. I’ll let you help me find what we came for. I can tolerate you, at least that long.”
The car came to a stop, the driver promptly turning to the pair. His accent was thick. “End of the line.” Within moments, he’d left the driver’s seat and was removing something from the trunk, then tapped the glass when he found it, waving a machete. “We go on foot,” his free hand gestured the way.
They trekked from the clearing where they parked through the forest, over a shallow river, to another clearing where they waited. The morning birds called and soon daylight broke through the trees. “It’s not like them to be late, is it?” Edgar scanned the tree-line and stopped. “There, something’s approaching.”
Before them, across the field, the horizon swayed, parting as people emerged from the thick underbrush of the forest. Two people. “These must be the soldiers. The rest must be watching.” Her voice was just loud enough for Edgar to hear. The pair approached; one in an olive drab flight suit, his cover was soft; the other in fatigues and a helmet. Both wore rifles clipped across their chests with 3-point slings; these were the soldiers. Nancy was not impressed.
It was Edgar, however, to voice his opinion first. “I expected soldiers to be a little more punctual, but maybe that was my fault…” Edgar was chewing on the butt of his unlit cigar and let out a laugh. “When I served, I guess the standard was higher.”
“You sound like British Special Forces,” the one in the overalls planted his feet, his eyes searching the horizon. “If my memory serves me correctly, we bailed you out in the last war, but I could be wrong.”
“Hey, I was in SAS,” Edgar turned back to Nancy, his eyebrows furrowed. “Why does everyone do that? Special Air Service — it’s not the same thing, it’s a different thing entirely!” He patted his coat and pants pockets for matches.
Nancy stepped towards the men. “I guess introductions have been made. What have you been told about this assignment so far?” She planted her hands on her hips, studying each soldier carefully.
The men looked at each other, then the one in fatigues answered, “That’s on the need-to-know bases. We’ve been instructed to retrieve some intel from you before we disclose anything.”
The other had his back to them, still scanning the distant trees. Then he spoke. “Cut it out, Sam. You soldiers and your damn pissing matches!” He turned to face Nancy. “My Marines and I have been running aerial surveillance out here for weeks. They won’t tell us why, but we know we’re looking for something. Nobody will tell us jack, though. Then they tell us we’re to link up with you. So, what my partner here means to say is, if you got something to say, spill it and stop wasting our time.”
Edgar took a long drag from his stogie. “Now, see, you must be the Marine.” He exhaled with a smile, and turned back to Nancy. “I like him.” He turned back to the men, pulling a couple of cigars from his coat pocket. “Cuban? Trust me, boys, it’s a long briefing. You’re gonna wanna take one of these. We got a lot to talk about.”
#
The bureaucracy called it compartmentalization; the soldiers joked about “need-to-know.” Nancy knew the truth was simpler—loose lips really did sink ships. That was why the Americans would never see the whole picture. Not yet.
The foothold came first. In the opening week, the Army and Marines hacked a clearing out of the forest, a restless camp that moved like a shadow across the tree line. They thought they were hunting guerrillas. In truth, they were decoys—noise in the woods to keep attention off the real work. Nancy and Edgar stayed in the basement of a fish plant in Da Nang, walls strung with maps and string, shifting through manifests, payroll ledgers, and whispered reports. While the Americans patrolled with rifles, CSS followed money.
By the second week, the balance was obvious. Soldiers brought back rumors of trails and ambushes; Nancy’s people produced names, businesses, families. Caliber Holdings—an empire of ghost companies reborn after Johnson’s order—gave her the reach she needed. She pulled threads through construction crews and produce vendors, assembling profiles so detailed she knew what time a man’s daughter left school.
The third week, she pushed further north, enlisting locals who could move where foreigners couldn’t. Dossiers expanded to cousins, wives, uncles. It was no longer a list of suspects; it was a living map of kinship, a lattice of obligations. By the fourth week, the web tightened into a roster of Vietcong sympathizers. When she convened a meeting to exchange findings, the Americans had little but patrol logs. Nancy had the enemy’s family tree.
She rarely left the factory. When she did, it was at night, veiled, her mind chewing over the one figure she wanted—a man who played businessman by day and general by night. To reach him, she studied his world: beauty regimens, fashions, the subtleties of status. Strategy was not just guns and numbers. It was knowing how to step into a room and make yourself inevitable.
By the second month, traffic patterns betrayed the forest. Supply trucks passed too often, too regularly. Nancy forbade her operators to fire a shot. Instead, they logged every route, every driver, every delivery. Hundreds of targets emerged from the paper. She demanded financials on all of them. Most were minnows. A few were whales—men whose reach spooled into whole communities. Their trail led to a family of nightclub owners, and from there, Nancy knew she was closing in.
Month three narrowed the search to the Ngok Linh Mountains, an empty map square pulsing with movement. Marines circled above, soldiers combed the slopes, and CSS burrowed into the nightclubs. Bartenders and bouncers became her informants; whispers of deliveries filled her ears. Nancy herself played a wealthy merchant’s daughter, moving in silks instead of fatigues, close enough to smell the cologne of her target.
The fourth month was silence and frustration. The mountain swallowed men whole. Patrols returned with nothing but leeches and bullet scars. Prisoners offered only fragments: drivers dropping cargo into empty clearings, too afraid to ask what came next. The soldiers grumbled, tired of watching Caliber operators vanish into villages and return with nothing they shared. Nancy remained object-oriented.
The breakthrough came in the fifth month, by accident and calculation both. An old retiree, eager to impress her, spoke of ore veins he had once mined in those mountains, a shaft abandoned for twenty years. The next morning Nancy demanded survey gear. By the sixth month, tests confirmed it: hollow spaces beneath the stone, a structure hidden in the summit.
The seventh month was patient suffocation. CSS wired the tunnels with eyes and ears, charted every shift and guard change, every truck that vanished through false rock doors. The Americans still thought they were here to deny supply lines. Nancy knew better. She could feel the weapon breathing in the dark, even if she didn’t yet know its shape.
They slipped into the compound like a library hush; soft, impossible, the only sounds nobody noticed. Nancy felt it in the silence first: no barking dogs, no lazy clank of a machine belt, no distant shout. The months of watching had paid themselves back in predictability; guard rotations had become mechanical, supply runs a lullaby. The place received them as if it had been waiting.
She moved with them through the throat of the service entrance, the metal cold under her palms. The air in the shaft smelled of wet iron and the faint chemical tang of whatever they were refining below. The darkness was not an obstacle but a velvet that hid the seams of the compound; their eyes adjusted. Nancy’s heart beat a metronome only she noticed—slow, steady—because a well-built plan demanded an even pulse.
Everything fell into place. Doors opened with soft clicks where locks had been memorized; lights died in rooms whose wires had already been coaxed into sleep. Men in the barracks breathed on cue, heavy with boredom, their positions familiar to the operators who had tasted their schedules for weeks. The sentries at the gates folded into silence like book pages turned; no one screamed, no one rose. Nancy watched the movement as if she watched a map reveal itself: the barracks sealed, the comms looped, the inner doors clear. It all looked too easy. That was the kind of success that tasted like varnish—slick and false.
She led them to the commander’s quarters with the translator tucked along her hip. He sat with a mug of something brown and bitter and a cigarette crushed between stained fingers. Up close the lines in his face made him smaller than the story he had told: not a general’s jaw but a retired miner’s knotted hands, the same man who’d bragged about the mine in a smoky club. Recognition slid through her like a cold pin.
“Why did I not guess I would find you here? Of all the ‘known knowns’, and ‘known unknowns’, it’s you. I should have taken you up on your offer that night, huh? Would have saved me a couple of months of trouble.”
The general was motionless, raising his hand only to take a puff from his cigarette, before he shrugged, “Baby, you would have had the time of your life.” He took a drag, leaving the cigarette tucked, reaching to his side. He raised his shirt, revealing a small firearm and long remote. “May I?”
Nancy shot a glance at Edgar, who kept his eyes on the door, and he took a closer position. “Suit yourself. Nobody’s coming to save you.”
On his feet, the remote aimed across the room to a tv which flicked on in a flash. It was an animated broadcast; a little brown mouse, a black cat in pursuit. “It’s time for my program, if this is going to be the last thing I get to enjoy.” His head shook slowly and ashes fell to his lap. “You Americans, all you know how to do is kill.”
“I’m not an American.” Nancy was in his face. She smelled the tar on his breath, the body odor from his pits. “You know what I’m here for. And you know the US is looking for you, but I’m not working for them.” She took two steps back, seeing a seat in the corner to sit in, turning off the TV as she passed. “Let’s make a deal, friend!” She reared back to the wall on two legs.
“Not American? I don’t understand.” He made his way back to his seat, placing the remote and his sidearm on the table. “If you’re not American, who are you? Why are you here?”
“Don’t you have a saying for this? ’The enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Buddy, you and I have one hell of an enemy on our hands.”She cocked her head, studying.
“I still don’t know what you want.” A grin thinned his lips.
“I obviously want what you have! Seriously, sir, do you know how hard it was to track you down to this mine in the mountains? I mean, had I not met you that night — or any other night for that matter, we might still be out there fumbling around the woods. Months. To almost come up empty-handed. You know what brought me all the way out here, don’t play coy with me.”
He adjusted in his seat, crossing his legs, grabbing his ankle. “So you can’t tell me what you want? You want the mine? The resources? I told you before, it’s depleted.”
“Yeah? You also told me you sold it, remember that?” She leaned to the edge of her seat, searching his face for patience.
“I sold the land. Not the life inside. Not the operation.”
“I don’t want your operation!” Her voice was a low rumble. “I want you to stop playing stupid, because you’re going to force my hand in a way both of us will regret.” She sat back, rolling her neck and shoulders. “Bring him in. I’ll just have to show you.”
Edgar waved down the hall, and scuffling shoes shuffled in the room and stopped at the doorway.
With a clatter, the general’s remote was on the floor, hands pressed to his face. “What is this!? Khang Pham? Where have you been? We thought you were—” The two broke into Vietnamese.
Nancy didn’t speak the language, but she had an understanding of what was being said. In short, they’d given young Khang the best treatment of his life, all he needed to do was talk about his supply line. No doubt, Khang had mentioned how the soldiers wanted to kill him, but Nancy saved his life. She was sure he’d mentioned that none of their people were harmed. She knew he would because she paid him. She even paid him to tell the general his testimony was paid for. “Have you heard enough?”
Edgar pulled the boy from the room, leaving just the silence between them. “That’s not the card that I was talking about. That was your last chance for, I’m not sure, clarity? You have to know, if I’m here, the US knows you’re here. If we walk out that door without you, well, let’s just say we’ll both be met with ‘shock and awe’. That boy, you and your men, this facility, and everything you’re working on; all of it will be gone by morning. Wiped from the earth. I’m here to propose a different future. I’m in a position to make you, well, let’s just call it an ‘international partnership’.” She sat back and let her words sink in.
In less than a minute, the man was on his feet, adjusting his uniform. With a gentle wave, he led them deeper into the compound. The room beyond was crude and human—tables lashed together, a spool of cable like a sleeping snake, a rack of metal boxes humming with low heat. It should have been underwhelming, but Nancy felt it as a pulse: a shape that could be taught to think. It was a machine cobbled from discarded IBM mainframes and mining instrumentation; and hunger. “They came in a couple of years ago, and brought all these people and equipment and paid well to occupy this area of the facility. They trained us on how to build it, and so here we have been, ever since. But it’s out of our understanding.”The general explained with the proud tremor of someone who had watched a child be built and could not love the thing enough to destroy it. He showed her how it took maps and currents, any data that could be quantified, and compiled lists and folded them into answers. For the first time in months, Nancy’s breath caught not from fear but from the pleasure of recognition. This was no grenade; it was a seed. “They call it the WPU: Wartime processing unit.” He marveled at his child.
Nancy marveled too. “Mister White, a word?” They moved to a quiet corner, keeping their eyes on the old man. “Thoughts?”
Edgar looked over at the machine, “It’s definitely something, alright. It’s big, that’s for sure.”
“Can we use it?”
“If it does what he says it does, but we need to get it out of here. Now. It can’t come back to base with us. The soldiers are expecting, you know, a little bloodshed. They have orders to make sure this place is scuttled.”
He was right. They were supposed to be killing everyone, yet there hadn’t been a single shot fired, and what was more, her plan was to walk out the front door, with the general and the device. “OK. We need to make the call. It’s time to exfiltrate.” Nancy beckoned for the radio operator, who jogged over and took a defensive stance while she relayed the mission was into its final phase. “Mister White, tag that crate with a transponder. General. Now is your moment of truth. I can save you, maybe even some of your men, but once we leave this place, I cannot guarantee anyone’s safety but yours, and I can only do that if you stay with the WPU. Don’t leave its side, or you’re going to die.”
Edgar and the operators packed the device up for shipment. The general woke his forces, leading them to escape from secret hatches. All that was left now was for Nancy and Edgar to walk out the front door, just as planned.
They moved outward with the crate between them, the machine wrapped in oilcloth like a relic. Outside, the night held its breath. Through the darkness, footsteps approached and from the abyss the 2-unit leaders approached, casually.
“Status report? What happened? Is that it? I thought we had orders to scrap it in place, and scuttle the area?” The Marine inspected the crate, then the general. “Who’s this guy, another prisoner?”
“I’m not a prisoner,” the general’s tone was deep, his foot stomped.
“In the event that you made it out with the weapon, we’re ordered to take possession of it.” The soldier reached for his radio, Edgar lowering it from his mouth.
“Now, just hold on a moment, rough rider, there was a change to the mission; did you not get it?”
Nancy gripped her sidearm, cutting eyes between the general, Edgar, and the soldiers. “He’s right, the CIA wants it. That’s who tasked us with this job. I don’t know where you get your orders from, but ours comes straight from the top. Langley.”
She told the soldiers the story she wanted them to hear—no blood, a negotiated surrender, a clean end—because that version kept the American commanders from asking stupid questions in loud voices.
The choppers came like moths to a lantern, rotors folding light into the trees. Men were loaded, the general shushed his troops, everyone playing the role she had written. The crate was hitched and hoisted.
Then the radios changed freight. Voices that had hummed with tasking snapped into alarm. Nancy heard the single syllable the translator could not smooth: “Hold.” The soldiers’ formations wobbled. A different cadence came down the line—orders the Americans could not refuse. The knot in Nancy’s stomach, which had never loosened in two months, cinched hard.
The sound came last, but it was the force that changed everything. A low, rolling thunder first felt in the teeth, then a column of light that tore the horizon. Napalm fell with the cruel deliberateness of a god; it did not strike singly but in a sheet that folded the forest up and burned it like paper. Heat hit them like a physical thing, a wall that pushed at ribcages and turned breath into a razor. Nancy tasted it—metal and burning hair and the metallic tang of oxygen too hot to breathe.
Operators and Vietcong make a daring dash into the undergrowth, XSS bound extraction point, legs cutting in the thick mud, each step a crucible. She felt her skin flare and hiss where the heat licked too close; a wet, searing pain that punched her thoughts into smallness. The rope dangled like salvation; men climbed, slipping and screaming and rising. Nancy grabbed and found the fibers cut at the edge of their grip by fuel and heat. Her palms burned. Her lungs filled with the mouthful of smoke that would not clear.
“Special Air Services! A different thing entirely!”
She felt two hands take her—Edgar’s—and the world narrowed to the ache in her wrists and the pressure of his grip. He hauled, not gently, not kindly, but with the exact desperation of a man who had counted the cost and chosen to carry it. He did not shout. He did not negotiate. He wrapped an arm around her waist and threw his weight into a pull that put both of them into the chopper as it rose on a column of updraft and flame.
Inside the bird, the fuselage shuddered and men vomited, and someone retched a curse in Vietnamese. Nancy lay against the cold metal, feeling the kisses of flame where the heat had done its work. The air was a furnace; every breath a blade. Edgar knelt beside her, fingers fumbling for her pulse like a man finding currency in the dark. “Stay with me,” he said, and it was less a pleading than an order. He had saved her; that fact settled inside her bones like a second wound.
Below them, the mountain became a map of smoke and glowing red. The compound was smoldering—what had been hushed and wired and careful now lay open like a wound. Men shouted in a dozen languages, and the chopper, the unmarked bird that had carried them out, pitched toward the black curve of the sea. Nancy stared into the dark as if the mountain might return her something she had left behind: the machine, the commander’s small, stubborn face, the sense that she had walked through someone else’s life and taken something vital.
Her hands were raw. Her breath rattled. Above the pounding of the rotors, she heard nothing for a long moment except the stern, careful clicks of her own thinking, the cold geometry of contingency. She had been burned, but the plan had worked in ways she had not expected: she obtained the device; she had her life; but she also now possessed these wounds that would demand remedy. Edgar’s face hovered over her—a man who had stepped across a line to pull her out of a fire not of his making. For a heartbeat, she considered gratitude, then replaced it with the more useful thought: what would this obligate him to, and what would she owe in return? She coughed, grasping her chest, reaching for Edgar.
“Shhh… Commander, Save your breath…. We’ll be back on the ship shortly. Back stateside just in time for Christmas. Look at that.” He tried to cease her lips, her hand knocking his away.
“I — I—“ she stammered, struggling, seething, “told you, the doctors should be in the field!” Breath labored, her body went limp, overcome with shock.
