by Larry Bond
“Until we get information from them, yes.”
Josh steadied himself over the small pool of vomit and mucus. He’d finally caught his breath, but his heart still raced and his whole body shook.
He knew he had to move. He pushed himself upright, then rose unsteadily.
Move! he told himself. Move! You’re not a five-year-old anymore. These aren’t the people who killed your parents. Go! Go!
They weren’t the same people, but they were just as dangerous—different incarnations of the same evil, he thought to himself as he started to move.
The memory of his childhood horror—never fully repressed, never fully confronted—rose from the dark recesses of his consciousness. He tried to ignore it, focusing on the forest before him, feeling the leaves that snapped and slashed at his fingers as he started to move again. He heard a noise behind him, below—he was running upward, he realized for the first time, climbing the mountain.
They were after him.
The boy whose family had been murdered hadn’t panicked, entirely; in the end, he had acted very rationally—and very much like a boy. He had started running out of fear. But then something else took over, something stronger. He began to act as if he were a character in one of the games he often played, Star Wars Battlefront.
He became a clone trooper on Dagobah, dodging through the dense swamp and jungle as he hid from the crazy men who’d come to shoot his family. The cornfield, its stalks bitten to the earth by the harvester, became the large swamp at the center of the battlefield. Old Man’s Rock—the marker at the corner of their field and the neighbors’—became the landing port for the Federation reinforcements. And the Johnsons’ cow field became the portal he had to escape to.
It was not like the game, exactly; he had no weapon, nor options to alter his character. But the boy became the player, dodging through the field, careful to get away. As long as he was the player, rather than the boy, he could survive. He’d done it before, countless times, playing with his older brother.
And he did it again.
Josh slowed, began to walk rather than run. Running only helped his pursuers—it made him easier to hear. His steps became quieter, more purposeful. His breathing slowed. His eyes, nearly shut until now, opened and let him see as well as any cat.
Gradually, a strategy occurred to him, coalescing around questions that began to form in his mind.
How many are after me?
It couldn’t be many, because they were difficult to hear.
Which direction are they coming from?
The camp, now to his right. Southeast.
Did they see me, or only hear me running through the forest?
It must have been the latter; if they’d seen me, they would have shot immediately.
The questions continued, as did the answers. Josh moved very slowly now, so slowly that at times he felt that he was sleeping standing up.
What do I have with me? A weapon?
Nothing of use. He had the little Flip 5 video camera in his pocket, left there after the evening campfire when he’d amused his colleagues by interviewing them. He had a lighter, Tom’s, which he’d used to light the lantern and failed to give back. He had a guitar pick, from Sarah, a token of good luck she’d slipped into his hand at the airport.
No weapon, no gun.
The noises he’d heard drifted away. But he sensed they were still hunting him, just as long ago the killers had followed. They had wanted to kill him not because he was a witness; their twisted minds didn’t care about that. To them there was no possibility of being caught, let alone punished. They wanted him the way a hungry man wants food. Killing his family had whetted their appetite, and now they were insatiable.
He saw rocks ahead. Slowly, he walked to them.
The outcropping was just at the edge of a slope of bamboo stalks.
Hide in the bamboo?
No. It was too thin—someone with a nightscope could see him.
Move through it. There would be another place to hide somewhere.
Josh began moving to his left. There was something to his right, something moving.
He lowered himself to his haunches slowly, crouching, not even daring to breathe.
Perhaps I’m already dead, he thought. Perhaps these are the last thoughts that will occur to me.
Jing Yo stopped and turned to Private Po, waiting for the rifleman to catch up. While splitting his small team up made tactical sense, it carried an inherent risk. There was no way for the groups to communicate with each other. Like in every other unit in the Chinese army, none of the enlisted men were supplied with radios.
Officially, this was due to equipment shortages. The real reason was to make it more difficult for the enlisted men to organize a mutiny. The fear was well warranted; Jing Yo had heard of two units rebelling against their commander’s orders over the past few months. One of these actions amounted to only a few men who balked at being transferred from the northern provinces where they had been stationed for years. The other was much more serious: two entire companies refused to muster in protest of their failure to get raises. Both cases had been dealt with harshly; the units were broken up, with the ringleaders thrown into reeducation camps.
Their officers suffered more severe punishment: execution by firing squad.
“Our quarry has stopped somewhere,” Jing Yo told Private Po. “See what you can see in that direction there.”
The private raised his rifle and looked through the scope. The electronics in the device were sensitive to heat, and rendered the night in a small circle of green before the private’s eyes. Unfortunately, the thick jungle made it difficult for him to see far.
“Nothing,” whispered Private Po.
Jing Yo became an eagle in his mind’s eye, rising above to view the battlefield. The mountain jutted up sharply ahead; the jungle diminished, leaving vast swaths of bamboo and rock as the only cover. A skilled man trying to escape them would stay in the deep forest.
But was their quarry skilled? There were arguments either way. On the one hand, he had made enough noise for an otherwise incompetent soldier to hear him. On the other, he had left no obvious trail in the thick brush, and was now making no sound that could be heard.
There is no silence but the universe’s silence.
His mentors’ words came back to him. On the surface, the instruction was simple enough: One must learn to listen correctly; hearing was really a matter of tuning one’s ears. But as with much the gray-haired monks said, there was meaning beyond the words.
“Are we in the right place?” asked Private Po.
“Ssshhh,” replied Jing Yo.
His own breath was loud in his ears. He slowed his lungs, leaning forward. The jungle had many sounds—water, somewhere ahead, brush swaying in the wind—a small animal—
Two footsteps, ahead.
Barely ten yards away.
“Your rifle,” Jing Yo said to the private, reaching for it.
Josh tried to hold his breath as he slipped forward. They were very close, close enough for him to have heard a voice.
He stepped around a low rock ledge, edging into a thick fold of brush. He wanted to move faster, but he knew that would only make more noise. Stealth was more important than speed. If he was quiet, they might miss him.
Something shifted nearby. A cough.
They were much closer than he’d thought—ten yards, less, just beyond the clump of trees where he’d paused a moment ago.
Move more quickly, he told himself. But just as quietly.
He took two steps, then panic finally won its battle, and he began to run.
It was not sound but smell that gave their prey away. The smell was odd, light and almost flowerlike, an odd, unusual perfume for the jungle, so strange that Jing Yo thought at first it must be a figment of his imagination.
Then he realized it was the scent of Western soap.
He turned the rifle in the scent’s direction, then heard something moving, stumblin
g, running.
He rose. A body ran into the left side of the scope, a fleeting shadow.
It would not be useful to kill him, Jing Yo thought. But before he could lower his rifle, a shot rang out.
The bullet flew well above Josh’s head, whizzing through the trees. There was another, and another and another, just as there had been that night when he was a boy.
He’d had many nightmares of that night. His sleeping mind often twisted the details bizarrely, putting him in the present, as a grown man trying to escape, changing the setting—often to the school or even his uncle’s house, where he’d gone to live—and occasionally the outcome: once or twice, his father and mother, both sisters, and his brothers survived.
But Josh knew this wasn’t a dream. These weren’t the two people who’d chased him when he was ten, and he wasn’t able to end this ordeal simply by screaming and opening his eyes. He had to escape. He had to run!
He bolted forward, tripping over the rocks, bouncing against a boulder that came to his waist and then rebounding against a thick tree trunk. Somehow he stayed on his feet, still moving. There were shouts, calls, behind him.
Panic raged through him like a river over a falls. He threw his hands out, as if he might push the jungle away. A tree loomed on his right. He ducked to his left, hit a slimmer tree, kept going. He pushed through a bush that came to his chest.
More bullets.
A stitch deepened in his side. His chest tightened, and he tasted blood in his mouth. The trees thinned again, and he was running over rocks.
Run, his legs told his chest, told his arms, told his brain.
Run!
Sergeant Fan had fired the shot that had sent their quarry racing away. Jing Yo yelled at him, calling him an idiot, but then immediately regretted it. Upbraiding an inferior before others, even one who deserved it as Fan did, was not his way.
“Don’t let him escape,” said Jing Yo, springing after the runner. “But do not kill him either. We want to know what he knows.”
The forest made it hard to run. Jing Yo realized this was a problem for the man they were pursuing as well as for them, and conserved his energy, moving just fast enough to keep up. Ai Gua and Private Po had moved to the flanks; they had good position on the man if he decided to double back.
He wouldn’t. He was panicked, a hare racing from the dragon’s claws.
An odd man, to be able to move so quietly, under such control at one moment, only to panic the next. Jing Yo could understand both control and panic, but not together.
His own failing, perhaps. A limit of imagination.
Sergeant Fan fired again. Jing Yo turned to confront the sergeant. This time there was no reason not to speak freely; on the contrary, the circumstances called for it, as the sergeant had not only been careless but disobeyed his direct order.
“What are you doing?” demanded Jing Yo.
“I had a shot. He’s going—”
Jing Yo snapped the assault gun from the sergeant’s hand. Stunned, and wheezing from his exertion, Fan raised his hands, as if to surrender.
“Sergeant, when I give an order, I expect it to be followed. We want the man alive. I said that very specifically. When we return to camp, you will gather your things and report to division. Understood?”
Without waiting for an answer, he spun back to the pursuit.
Josh didn’t hear the water until he was almost upon it. His first thought was that he would race through it—the soft sound made him picture a shallow brook coursing down the side of the mountain. Then he thought he would wade down it, throwing the men off his trail.
With his second step, he plunged in above his knee. Josh twisted to the left, but he’d already lost his balance. He spun and landed on his back. Everything was a blur. This was no gentle, babbling brook. Josh fell under the water, bumped back to the surface, then found himself swirling out of control in the current. He flailed wildly, rolling with the water, spinning and alternately sinking and rising up, thrown into a confused maelstrom, gripped by the ice-cold water. He felt dead; no, beyond dead, sent to the frozen waste of some Asian afterlife as a doomed soul forced to endure eternal tortures.
Jing Yo pulled his handheld from his pocket and punched the GPS preset. The stream did not exist on the map, the cartographers not able to keep up with changes wrought by the rapid climate shifts. Snow in these mountains was a rare occurrence as late as 2008, when a one-inch snowfall in February made headlines. Now the mountain averaged nearly a foot and a half in winter, most of it in late January, a product of shifting wind, moisture, and thermal patterns. The snowmelt produced the stream, and Jing Yo supposed that the streambed would be rock dry or at best a trickle within a few weeks.
Right now, though, it was as treacherous as any Jing Yo knew from his native province of Xinjiang Uygur, where such seasonal streams had existed since the beginning of time.
“He fell in,” said Ai Gua. “He is a dead man.”
Between the swift current and the frigid temperature, Ai Gua’s prediction was probably correct. On the other hand, it was just possible that he had made it to the other side.
Jing Yo turned to Sergeant Fan. “Sergeant, take Ai Gua with you and head upstream. See if you can find a good place to cross. Then come back west. Private Po will come with me. This time, do not fire except under my direct order. No one is to fire,” Jing Yo repeated. “No one.”
Jing Yo began walking to the west, paralleling the bank of the stream. The water cut a haphazard channel, at some points swallowing trees, giving them a wide berth at others. It moved downhill, curving into an almost straight line within thirty meters of the spot where they believed their target had gone in.
Jing Yo took the rifle from Private Po, then stepped into the current where he could get a good view downstream. Ignoring the chill that ran up his legs, he moved carefully in the loose stones and mud. Within three steps the water came to his knees. Its pull was strong, trying to push him down; he tilted his entire body against it as he raised the rifle and its sight to see.
The heat of a body should show up clearly if on the surface of the water, but only there. There was considerable brush on both sides of the stream as it continued downward.
Nothing.
Jing Yo nearly lost his footing as he turned to come back out of the water. Only the sense of balance built up by years of practice saved him. He moved silently forward, climbing up the short rise to where Private Po stood.
“Perhaps he is dead already,” said Po as he handed back the rifle. “I hope so.”
“Do not wish for a man’s death, Private.”
“But he’s an enemy.”
There was no difference between wishing a man’s death and wishing one’s own, but there was no way to explain this to the private in terms that he would understand. Telling the enlisted man about Ch’an was out of the question; were the wrong official to find out, even such a simple gesture could be misinterpreted as proselytizing to the troops, a crime typically punished by three years of reeducation.
Unless one was a commando. Then he could expect to be made an example of.
They worked their way down fifty meters to a stand of gnarled trees. The vegetation was so thick they couldn’t pass without detouring a good distance to the south, moving in a long semicircle away from their ultimate goal. Finally the terrain and trees cooperated. Jing Yo tuned his ears as they turned back toward the stream, listening to the sounds that fought their way past the sharp hiss of the water. He heard frogs and insects, but nothing large, nothing moving on or near the water, no human sounds.
Perhaps their quarry was a truly clever man, who’d only pretended to panic. Or maybe in his panic he had found the strength to cross the stream. Fear was a most powerful motivator, stronger than hunger or the desire for love and sex.
Western soap. Unlikely for a Vietnamese soldier, who would be paid as poorly as he was fed. So he must be a scientist.
A good prize then.
They returned to th
e stream at a large, shallow pool. It was longer than it was wide, extending for nearly twenty meters, acting as a reservoir and buffer. This was just the sort of place where a body would wash up.
Jing Yo checked the surface carefully, scanning with the private’s rifle sight. When he didn’t see anything, he headed downstream. The pool grew deeper as he went, until at last the water was at his waist. Once again he used the scope to scan the area; finding nothing, he reluctantly waded back to shore.
He was just handing the rifle back to Private Po when his satellite radio buzzed at his belt.
“Jing Yo,” he said, pushing the talk button.
“Lieutenant, where are you?” demanded Colonel Sun.
Yo pressed the dedicated GPS button, which gave his exact coordinates to Sun’s radio. As a security measure against possible enemy interference, the location of each unit could not be queried; it had to be sent by the user.
“Have you found your man?” asked Sun.
“We’ve tracked him to a stream.”
Jing Yo started to explain the situation, but the colonel cut him off.
“Get back here. It seems the idiots in the 376th Division have made yet another blunder.”
Jing Yo could only guess what that meant.
“Lieutenant?”
“I’m not positive that the man we were following died in the water,” Jing Yo told the colonel. “If I could have an hour to find the body—”
“Leave it. I need you here.”
“We will come immediately.”
4
Washington, D.C.
“No doubt about it,” said CIA Director Peter Frost. “A regiment of tanks, right on the border with Vietnam. And there’s more. A lot more. Give them three days, maybe a week, and they can have a full army inside the country.”
President George Chester Greene folded his arms as the head of the CIA continued. Over the past two weeks, the various U.S. intelligence agencies had been piecing together the repositioning of a significant Chinese force along the Vietnamese border. At first there had been considerable debate; the evidence was thin. But it was thin for a reason—the Chinese had taken every conceivable step to conceal the movement.
