CHAPTER TWO

      Panama Canal

      Dr. Richard Spellman wasn’t a man who enjoyed wasting his time; he was much too busy for it. He wasn’t one of those doctors who kept America’s golf courses in business or one who took extended winter vacations in exotic resorts. For one, he wasn’t a wealthy man, and two, he wasn’t the kind of doctor who could take time off. He was an M.D. bench researcher in a university hospital; not too much downtime came with the job. While his salary was less than stellar by current medical standards, he didn’t really care. He loved what he did. He loved it so much, in fact, that his wife had divorced him and taken up with a California plastic surgeon. Not only was she able to get her face-lifts and boob jobs done free now, but her new husband was willing to take her to exclusive, exotic locales and to parade her to show off his handiwork.

      So, being on a cruise ship passing through the Panama Canal en route to the Caribbean was a first for Spellman and totally out of character. But it wasn’t really a vacation, either. The sole reason he was on board the SS Carib Princess was that the Society of Genomic Research was holding its annual meeting on board, and he had been invited to present a paper on his work. Even so, if the association hadn’t picked up his tab for the cruise and offered him an honorarium, he couldn’t have afforded to attend.

      He’d been prepared to really hate wasting the time both before and after he made his presentation, but he had to admit that he was actually starting to enjoy himself. He’d never been at sea before and found the experience strangely liberating. Also, after a couple of years eating his own cooking, he was thoroughly enjoying the ship’s cuisine on his all-inclusive ticket.

      Spellman stood at the rail watching the early evening jungle along the banks of the canal as the ship approached the eastern lock. In a little more than an hour, they would be in the Caribbean steaming for the island of Aruba. That would be another first for him; he’d never been to a tropical island. He turned when he heard footsteps approach.

      “There you are, Richard,” a woman in a light tropical dress said with a smile.

      Dr. Mary Hamilton was the other reason he had started to enjoy the cruise. Since his divorce, his social life had been pretty much confined to exchanging mumbled greetings with the surly waitress in the restaurant where he had breakfast. When he’d found himself almost the only single guy in a boatload of doctors with their trophy wives and younger girlfriends in tow, he’d been a little overwhelmed. It made him realize how long it had been since he’d enjoyed the scent of a woman. On the second night out, though, he’d stumbled onto Mary.

      She was a woman many men wouldn’t notice. She wasn’t a fashion plate, nor was she young enough to be a centerfold. She was, however, trim, confident and intelligent. That rare combination made her more than exotic to his eyes. Best of all, she was also a Ph.D. research director for a major pharmaceutical company. He worked in a smaller university setting, but their professional lives were similar and they could talk shop. Until meeting her, he hadn’t realized how nice it was to be able to talk about his work with a woman who understood what he did for a living.

      “You ready to go in to dinner?” she asked. “The eight o’clock bell just rang.”

      Being a man who hated to waste time, Spellman took her arm. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Rather than standing in line with the rest of the herd at the common trough, why don’t we go down to that little French restaurant on the second deck and eat by ourselves. It seemed like a nice place, and the menu looked interesting.”

      He didn’t add that this place he suggested was an intimate little bistro designed more for romantic encounters than for pedestrian dining. But if he was going to get to know this woman better, and he intended to, he wasn’t going to waste any more time doing it.

      “Great idea.” Hamilton smiled. “I’m up for a few snails in garlic butter.”

      Spellman grimaced. He should have checked on her culinary preferences. But in for a penny, in for a pound. If he needed to, he’d introduce her to breath mints.

      NGUYEN CAO NGUYEN stood on the deck of the blacked-out canal tug as it approached the stern of the Carib Princess. On deck with him were two dozen heavily armed Matador operatives in black combat suits. Another dozen men stood behind them ready to take command of the ship after the assault teams had secured it. Doing the takedown in the canal made it easier, and his allies at the eastern lock guaranteed that the ship’s passage under new management would go without a hitch.

      With the ship brightly lit, the Vietnamese had no trouble seeing the hatch open in the hull above the stern. A figure in a crewman’s uniform rolled out a long rope ladder and lowered it over the side.

      “Go!” he said in Spanish, and motioned to the waiting assault leader.

      The black-clad commandos swarmed up the rope ladder, their silenced weapons slung over their backs, and disappeared inside the ship. To keep from being spotted, Nguyen had the tugboat captain back off a hundred yards while he waited. He didn’t mind the wait because he’d been waiting for years to get his payback.

      During the Vietnam war, Nguyen had been a young Vietcong agent planted in the USAID office in Saigon. In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, he’d been exposed and sent to a South Vietnamese prison camp for six years. The North Vietnamese liberation of Saigon had freed him, but when he returned to what had been his home, he learned that his wife had moved in with an American foreign service officer in his absence.

      The Yankee was already gone, having fled with the rest of his people in the last-minute evacuation, but Nguyen had hunted down his unfaithful wife and killed her and her bastard half-Yankee child. He could now see that it had been an impulsive act, but he’d been imprisoned for a long time. Had he taken the time to think about it, he would have still killed her, but might not have done it so publicly. His wife’s family was high-ranking Vietcong officials, and he’d been forced to flee to Red China to escape their vengeance.

      Even though China and the People’s Republic of Vietnam shared the same twisted Oriental version of Marxism, they weren’t quite on speaking terms. In the aftermath of North Vietnam’s takeover of the South, the Chinese were concerned about continuing their expansionistic policies. The unsuccessful Vietnamese military incursions into the disputed Chinese border territory only confirmed their fears. Therefore, working on the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend theory, Nguyen was welcomed in China.

      When his debriefing revealed his vast working knowledge of American military and political activities, the Chinese took him on as an agent in their intelligence service. After extensive training, he’d been infiltrated into a group of “boat people” refugees from Hong Kong being sent to the United States. Once in the U.S., he settled in Southern Florida and, on orders of his Beijing masters, linked up with the Cuban DGI agents active there.

      The Chinese considered the Cubans to be rather unimportant in the grand scheme of world history, and bumbling, overly emotional amateurs to boot. But they were the sole Communist state in the Western Hemisphere and a good launchpad for China’s plans for the region. And Beijing had been making plans for Latin America for decades. Since Chinese strategic thought was always couched in terms of decades instead of weeks, Beijing didn’t mind letting someone else be their front man as long as it served their ultimate goals.

      When