The Path Changes the Traveler Ch. 02

She was beyond much of any measure that Morgan might have had in terms of feminine beauty. Her almond-shaped eyes looked at him with restrained interest, and that was the last that he saw of them for a moment as his eyes began to take in the rest of her.

She sat in a black silk robe of some sort, but he could see that portions of it at least were rather diaphanous - since he could almost see her breasts clearly. Her hair was tied into a tall topknot and yet there was still more than enough length to what remained to be able to reach so that the end of it covered one of her nipples. Other than that, her hair was tied back tightly, and he could see that she wore a pair of long, ... well, ... metal spiky-things at the back of her head.

He had no idea of what they might be or what the purpose of them was. To him, they looked like shiny shish kabob spikes with ornate grips.

Her right arm was covered by the long sleeve of her robe, but her left shoulder was bare and it showed him a long and exquisitely done tattoo of a heavily-scaled Chinese dragon who appeared to be roaring into her ear while its tail hung down the length of her arm to end at her hand.

"You're Mistress Quan, I take it?" he asked and she nodded with a slight smile.

"That is the way that I am called by most of the workers of my little hive here. You may just skip the 'mistress' part and call me 'Quan, please."

Morgan nodded, "Why did you address me as 'Captain'? That was my rank once, but I was a major when I left the army to go to Langley."

She smiled, "I, ... I have been to the United States on many occasions. I am a bit of a fan of rum now and then. Forgive me, and if you have no objections, I will leave it at only 'Morgan' henceforth."

He nodded, "I'm not sure what's happened and how I got here. I was speaking with my superior on the phone in the room where I woke up and - "

"I know," she nodded, "I was listening.

Mr. Schuyler has once again proven why he is such a slimy, self-aggrandising little bastard. What I asked that he say to you was not to worry or become upset; that nothing was wrong."

She rolled her eyes, "But something like that is not within his ability. He had to add the abduction when all that I wanted was to have you flown here to see if you might be interested in working for me for a time.

He was correct about the upheaval back at Langley, however. But I had already made the arrangements to have you work for me - and by the way, it's still working for the CIA. You are not 'missing in action' as he indicated. You're just based off-shore now and working out of here.

And you are not the only one, Morgan. It gives the appearance that a large scale clean-out has occurred there. The way that the directors see things, empty desks and offices mean that they are saving money so that they can get larger pay increases. Your pay is still the same. It is only coming from the division offices here, that's all.

If you wish, you may tell me that you do not wish to work here, and you will find yourself back at Langley where someone will notice you eventually and then you will be terminated from the payroll. This way, you're still working and trust me, there are many more interesting things going on here than there are over there in Virginia, that close to the Whitehouse.

One thing that Mr. Schuyler was truthful about is that his section was the one which was scheduled to be raped the least. That is because he handed them a list of his choices - sort of his personal list of the branches that he wouldn't have minded to have lopped off his tree.

He lied to you when he said that he tried to protect you from the effects of the cutbacks. He had you at the top of his list for pruning, and there's a copy of it on your new desk - in your new office, right up there on the top of the mountain which we're under at the moment."

She looked at her nails for a long moment then.

"Of course, it doesn't really matter anyway. His section was raped the least, but it was raped even still, and there will be a change implemented that he is at present not aware of.

Mr. Schuyler himself will be out of a job by eight AM, Langley time - that's a little more than thirty minutes from now.

I do have a little pull from all the way out here."

She looked up and Morgan couldn't tell the nature of her little smile then as she went on.

"Most of his Far Eastern intelligence came from me anyway, groomed and sorted by my analysts. He just took the secure telex feed from me and re-wrote it every morning for consumption upstairs. Whenever there was any real work to be done that needed a steady hand in the terminal phases, he farmed it out to you most often, though you never knew why it was needed.

It was all done to make Mr. Bobby Schuyler look good and irreplaceable to his bosses.

I took over the desk from here and merely eliminated the middleman along with the office-full of drones who were never given anything to analyse by him anyway. The very best of them will be standing exactly where you are now in two days so that I can make then the same offer that I'm making to you.

Please come and work for me.

I run things fast Morgan, but I never run things loose. I send my telex so that it arrives in plenty of time over at Spyland and it's delivered verbatim by the American-born mouthpiece that I've put in place there.

Your intelligence services are a little silly in some of the views that they hold. I can work for them as a major source of intelligence, but I cannot ever work there per se because I'm not an American national who was actually born on American soil.

As though that might make any difference in where my loyalty lies.

Some of the greatest breeches of your own nation's security were caused by people much more ... shall we say, 'Apple Pie' than myself. The truth is that my little nation here is almost totally dependent on yours for the materiel required to ensure its continued survival. The People's Republic of China is right over there," she pointed, "across only about a hundred miles of water.

I make myself available for queries, if there are any, and then I go to bed every night. It's a living," she smiled.

"What do you want from me, if I'm working for you?" Morgan asked.

"The same as before," she smiled, "but now you'll always know the whys and the wherefores. You'll have a much less mundane life and your input will be sought by myself and others frequently. I think that you'll find the job a lot closer to what you thought that you were signing on for."

"Sounds a lot better to me," Morgan nodded, "but I still don't know where I am."

Quan looked a little surprised then, and after a moment, she just grinned a little, "Of course. Schuyler never told you. He only had you drugged and delivered.

When I heard about it I was furious. That's no way to treat someone that I need to have working for me and it certainly can't have made a good impression. I'm very sorry about that, Morgan.

You're in Taiwan," she smiled.

"Half of the island is fairly mountainous and we are in those mountains. Most of this complex has been converted to better suit my needs and there is a lot more to the place.

Down here, it was a sort of prison long ago. We use it for training and for transitory quarters for operatives and others just passing through. Up top, near the peak, there is an old temple and monastery once occupied by an order of monks.

Out of sensibility for the past, the outward appearance has been maintained. There are no adherents to that faith anymore, so there is some rather discreet security around the place, but for the most part, it serves as a rather pleasant setting for the office space which you and I will share, along with a few others.

I'd suggest that you go and try to get some sleep. In the morning, I'll send someone to wake you and show you where you can eat. After that, ask him how to get to your suites in the temple and a little later in the day, you and I will sit down to plan your first job for me."

She held up her hand with a bit of a soft smile, "I know. You'd like me to at least define your role here a little bit. For the most part, it will be the same sort of work that you know and love," she smirked a little, "but there are other ... aspects to it, shall we say.

I'll need you to retrieve things for me from some places. Some of them will be inane and boring assignments, but there will be some others which you may find extremely challenging. In every case, I won't be sending you to the store to buy my cigarettes. Every time that I send you out, it will be for something that I have no better transporter for in my service."

She smiled broadly, "I have read your file, you know. I know about your talents and the way that you like to get things done during those rare times when Schuyler actually told you what was going on. Unlike him, it's important to me that you know the background every time, right at the outset, not later and in little bits which are almost useless to you in the field.

That will be a large part of what you do; transporting either documents, materiel, or even people.

I'd have liked to have been able to give you a bit of a mundane task to start you off, but recent events dictate to me that it just isn't possible.

The very first job that I have for you will be to accompany me to retrieve one person who is of tremendous importance to the function of this service, and to me personally. That person must be retrieved in safety.

The job is so crucial that you and I will go together. That way, we can feel each other out and learn best how to work together."

She noticed the slight shift in his expression and she smiled, "I didn't just ask to be given this job. I'm rather more than a pretty face behind a desk, Morgan. I know of over twenty ways to take a human life with my bare hands.

I have a sense that you and I will need each other a great deal in this line of work. This isn't Langley where there are rows and rows of civil servants anxiously spending their time watching the clock and counting down the days to their retirement.

We live in a more real world here. I am not given to using euphemisms to any great degree, Morgan. I will never call a job 'wet work' if I need someone eliminated, just as an example. If that happens, I'll tell you who I need you to kill and that's it.

For this job, you and I are going to pull an individual out of a very bad spot that she's in at the moment.

I need her back in one piece and still in control of her very creative and powerful mind."

"Who's the individual, Quan?" He asked.

Quan inspected her nails for just a second as she thought of the best answer that she might make to Morgan.

"Her name is Maggie," she said, "and at the moment, I happen to know that she is being held in northern Laos, so going there will have a little bit of déjà vu in it for you, I'm afraid. I cannot help that."

She looked up at Morgan once more and he noticed the glitter in her eyes, "But you and I are going to go there, Morgan Brock, and if necessary, we will lay waste to anyone and anything which might stand in our way.

For the actual insertion and extraction, we'll be using our own assets, so to speak; a pair of helicopters and their crews. We'll have support on the ground from a group of Hmong guerrillas that I've used before and on the way out, we'll have a flight of T-28 Trojans on station from Udorn to provide covering close-air support.

And it doesn't end there, "Quan said quietly, "I have authorisation for this to use certain assets belonging to the United States Air Force in order to facilitate the rescue of my sister.

I trust that you have the necessary training required to direct those assets if they are needed in the event I may require that from you."

Morgan's jaw fell open at that.

He didn't stand there with his mouth opening a little slowly in surprise, no ...

His jaw just fell open as though there were no muscles in his face to hold it shut.

"Your ... uh, sister, ... " he said slowly.

Quan nodded, "She is considered vital enough to the interests of everyone in this theatre of operations to allow some diversion in support of our mission. Among other things, I'll need you to act as a forward air controller to call and then direct our airborne support as needed. I know that you received the training to do that, and I know that you have done it before.

You're not rusty at it, are you?"

Morgan shook his head and said that it shouldn't be a problem. He phrased his next question a little carefully, "'Assets' as in, what, um ... specifically?"

Quan looked up from her inspection of her nails and Morgan didn't see any concern or worry there which might indicate uncertainty or anything less than total confidence.

"Whatever they have in the air able to assist and within thirty miles of us when you make the call."

---------

As it happened, Morgan soon learned that Quan was indeed not just a pretty face. Well there was that, he'd allow, though as they were inserted, she looked more like a member of the Hmong group who met them than they did themselves. And she was no newcomer to the use of an assault rifle, either.

The actual retrieval of this Maggie person went well, if a little bloodily and as they made their way back out again, Morgan had something else to wonder about.

They were sisters, as Quan had said, but aside from sharing the same long black hair and maybe their height, there wasn't a whole lot of similarity. Maggie looked like an American girl who might have an Oriental grandparent - maybe.

"Same mother," Quan grinned, standing next to her slightly confused and upset-looking sister for a moment as she looked for injuries, "different fathers. Maggie is the best analyst I have, when I can keep her out of the field."

At about that point, they became aware of a lot of North Vietnamese Army regulars several hundred meters below them and right in the way to where they had planned to go. Morgan gave it some thought and he agreed with Quan that it was coincidence, though not a happy one which couldn't have happened at a worse time.

Going back uphill was out of the question, so Morgan got on the horn, using the assigned call-sign of Blacklight. The replies that he got astounded him. He had to turn a few respondents away not wanting to turn this into a huge fight over nothing. They only needed coverage for their extraction.

He would have dreamed to have had the ability to call on assets like these so often before when he'd needed them during his army days.

'Rattler' was the call sign of a flight of F-4 Phantoms from out of Udorn who were on their way home with unexpended ordnance and were only too happy to set up a racetrack pattern three miles out.

'Muddy' was the group of USAF A-7D Corsair IIs From Korat who'd been assigned for on-call close-air coverage in the general area of the Plain of Jars and they immediately set to work, rolling in time after time as Morgan directed them.

But there were too many NVA and once they'd guessed that this wasn't just an attack, but that there was a purpose behind it, the group of Hmong were spotted not long after and it began to get a little uncomfortable as the Vietnamese began to try to move uphill in an effort to capture them.

Conscious of the limited loiter time of the Phantoms and the surprising progress that the enemy was making up the mountain, Morgan had them lay their bombs down as a barrier across the slope between him and the NVA. While that was going on, he called requesting help from any US aircraft in the area.

'Gunsmoke' flight answered within about three heartbeats and said they'd be on station over Morgan's position in five minutes or less.

When Morgan inquired as to the nature of their ordnance, he heard a voice that he'd never forget. It made him feel a lot better just to hear that long, deep, laid-back drawl from their flight leader.

"Blacklight from Gunsmoke Six, we're F-100s out of Phu-Khet."

Within the next two minutes, Morgan learned that the flight lead was from Oklahoma and not shy about it either.

"When you can see through the dust from those F-4s," Morgan said, "I'd like it if you could give me two parallel lines out toward the edges of that. I need a corridor down the slope, so spread them say 150 meters apart if you can.

"Roj on the corridor," Gunsmoke said, "Got enough so that it'll hide you some, but she's still gonna be a hot day there on the ground."

He asked Morgan to use a red smoke grenade so that he'd know where they were exactly. Morgan had to tell him that all he had left by then was 'Goofy Grape' or purple.

"Reckon that'll be good enough," the man said, sounding as though he was grinning.

As soon as Gunsmoke's lead saw the purple smoke, he pulled the flight around and keyed the mike in his helmet, "Ya'll get yer heads down, Blacklight. We're rolling in hot.

Gonna be the Lord's burning rain down there in a minute, son."

Morgan had a clue from his earlier questions, but it was still a little unsettling to see the long silver canisters of napalm tumble free from the bellies and from under the wings of the jets.

The ensuing firestorm gave them an avenue of escape and the group ran down the hill to the valley floor as Muddy and Rattler flights pounded any troops who though to pursue them.

Gunsmoke were nearing the end of their fuel to loiter with and had dropped everything they had anyway, so they said their goodbyes and departed just as the pair of black Sikorsky CH-53 helicopters swept over the knoll to the south of Morgan and Quan on their way back into the area for the pick up.

Quan gave Morgan a new frequency to contact the newcomers on and after making contact, he was advised that they'd brought their own close-air cover to the party and were requesting a sitrep, or situational report from him.

As soon as he'd provided it, he looked over to watch as a flight of T-28 Trojans appeared in the area and Morgan noticed right away that they were aggressive in the extreme as they set to work covering the extraction.

Running to meet up with the helos, Morgan thought that 'aggressive' might be a little tame to describe what he was looking at as the Trojans worked the area over. Everything that this bunch did looked to him to be a little ... point-blank.

He was a little certain that the crew chiefs for these aircraft were going to be picking bits of vegetation from the aircraft when they got back. They were practically doubling as lawnmowers.

As they lifted off and left the area, Quan told him why.

"They're all ex-pilots of the Royal Lao Air Force, Morgan. All they have left is to fly out of Udorn. There's no Lao air force left and they can't ever go back home.

You might say that their hearts are in it. They are happy to fight the army which is taking over their land as well."

The next day, Morgan sent cases of Captain Morgan rum to the various participants as a thank-you for peeling the North Vietnamese off their faces.

It took a few days, but at last, he finally got to see his new office. Quan had two new assignments for him already. He didn't think that he'd be spending a lot of time in it, the way that Quan seemed to like to work him, but surprisingly, for once in his career, he was actually happy.