by Larry Bond
Murphy laughed. He’d heard people say that at least a hundred times since his assignment at the War College began, and he’d been here only a few weeks.
It was literally true: they didn’t make Corvettes anymore, or any other car that got less than fifty miles to a gallon of gas. Even if the law hadn’t forbidden it, gas cost $14.39 a gallon; between that and the annual pollution surtax, few people wanted to pony up for a new sports car, especially when used ones could be purchased at bargain prices. Everyone said that in four or five years hydrogen-cell vehicles would match the “classics” in acceleration, top speed, and handling, but they’d been saying that for years.
Murphy wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep the Vette, a gift from his dad. Even after the raise that went with his promotion to major, paying for the gas was tough. It was quickly eating up the store of money he’d earned from combat pay as a Special Forces trainer in Ukraine.
Oh well—easy come, easy go.
Or not so easy come. There’d been a few times when he didn’t actually expect he’d make it home.
Zeus leaned on the wheel and turned hard onto the interior road, then swung into the parking lot in front of Building B-3, the prosaic name of the War College’s newest structure. Built with so-called green construction techniques, its entrance sloped upward from the earth, jutting out from under a moss-covered roof. The building’s geothermal system handled all of its heating and cooling; electricity was supplied by a farm of solar electric panels that flanked the northern side of the building.
The panels could not supply all of the building’s electric needs; there wasn’t enough space for panels or battery capacity to compensate for Pennsylvania’s cloudy weather. Even the high-efficiency windmills at the far end of the property couldn’t quite generate enough electricity to satisfy the hungry computer servers in B-3’s basement. Nonetheless, the building showed how serious the Army was about energy initiatives. It had been the subject of stories by nearly every media organization when it had opened a year before. Some of the techniques used in its construction would set the standards for years to come.
“Another day, another ass-kicking,” said Rosen, unsnapping the seat belt as Murphy turned off the engine. “How long will the U.S. last today?”
“Give them six months,” said Murphy, unfolding his six-eight frame from the low-slung car.
“Perry was pissed Friday when you bombed San Francisco at the start of the simulation.”
“Hey, it’s allowable under the rules.”
Rosen laughed. Known as Red Dragon, the simulation they were running pitted the U.S.—Blue—against China—Red. Neither country’s name was ever mentioned in the game, of course, but everyone who played knew who was who.
“They may change the rules if you keep this up,” said Rosen. “They’ll take away your advantage.”
“The rules are already lopsided in Blue’s favor,” said Zeus. “The simulation underestimates Chinese abilities.”
“Most of their army is way undertrained.”
“That’s reflected in the game. It’s overstated, really. China is like the U.S. in the late thirties. Capacity to kill.”
Zeus waved his pass in front of the card reader, which took the biometric data on its chip and compared it to the image before it, as well as the one stored in its own database. It took a few nanoseconds to make sure everything matched, then opened the door and let Zeus inside. Rosen had to wait to do the same—the system would not let more than one person pass at a time. Once inside, the two men passed through an eight-foot-wide by twenty-foot-long chamber; as they did, chemical and radiation sensors “sniffed” them to make sure they weren’t carrying anything dangerous.
Then came the live checks. The sentry in the vestibule inserted the ID cards into his own reader, then had them open their bags and empty their pockets for inspection.
“Sergeant Jacobs, you do this every day,” said Rosen. “Don’t you know us by now?”
“Sir, I do this every day because I know you.”
“If you didn’t, you’d strip-search us?”
“If necessary, sir.”
“You want to see us in our undies, don’t you, Sergeant?”
“Not so soon after breakfast.”
Finally waved through, the two officers walked down the hall past a wall of glass that looked out on a man-made pond and waterfall (part of the heating and cooling system), then took the stairs to the lower level. They were a few feet from their assigned office when Colonel Doner, who ran the simulation section, called out to them.
“Majors, good of you to show up this morning.”
“Colonel, we’re ten minutes early by my watch,” said Rosen.
“Ten minutes early is twenty minutes late by my watch, Rosen.” Doner scowled at him. “Come and talk with me, Zeus.”
The colonel spun on his heel and walked down the hall to his office. Murphy gave Rosen a shrug and followed.
“Maggie, get the major some coffee, please,” said Doner briskly as he passed through the outer office into his lair.
Murphy smiled at Maggie. She had a round, exotic face and perfect hips, but unfortunately had only recently married, and was therefore officially out of bounds according to Murphy’s sense of duty and honor.
Not to mention the fact that her husband was a Special Forces lieutenant colonel who not only outranked him but knew even more ways than he did to kill with his bare hands.
“Just a little milk, Major?” she asked, getting up from her desk. The coffee was located down the hall in a small lounge.
“Just a little,” said Zeus. He watched her walk out the door, then went into Doner’s office.
“See something you like?” said Doner. He frowned, though not as severely as he had at Rosen.
“I know the boundaries, sir.”
“I’m sure you do. Hang on just a second.”
Doner had four different workstations lined up on the table behind his desk. Two showed simulations in progress. He made sure each was working properly, then pulled out his seat and sat down. Besides his personal laptop, a simple Dell open at the corner of his desk, he had no less than twelve working CPUs in the office, most of them in a double bank against the far wall. There were also a number of laptops stacked on a trolley in the corner.
Doner was not the typical hands-off military supervisor Zeus had expected from his tours before Special Forces. The colonel was an unabashed geek who had hand-assembled several of the larger computers in the office, and written parts of the software that ran the war games simulations he oversaw.
Doner liked to claim that when he had joined the Army, the only thing he knew about computers was how to turn them on; while it was a slight exaggeration, the forty-year-old colonel had truly learned on the job.
“All right,” said Doner, returning to his desk. “How was your weekend?”
“Real fine, Mike. Yours?”
“The ten-year-old needs braces. I didn’t know they put them in braces that early.”
“Neither did I.”
“I don’t think I even knew there was such a thing as braces until I was sixteen or seventeen,” said Doner.
And by then it was too late, thought Zeus—though he didn’t say it. That was the difference between him and Rosen. His friend didn’t know when to shut the hell up. Not very important for a captain, but critical for a major, and all ranks above.
“You probably didn’t need braces, did you?” added Doner.
“No, actually I didn’t.”
“Charmed life.” Doner smiled—it was a crooked smile, with a bit too much enamel missing on the front teeth—then leaned back in his chair. “Zeus, I need a favor from you.”
“A favor?”
“We have some visitors coming today. They’re interested in seeing Red Dragon.”
Murphy felt his face flush. The colonel was going to ask him to throw the simulation and let Perry win.
Could he agree to that?
It wasn’t simply a ma
tter of ego. Though they operated like very sophisticated computer games, the simulations were very serious business. The results were recorded and analyzed, then integrated into various war plans and strategy papers prepared by the Army staff. The results from one simulation might not make that big a difference in the overall scheme of things … and then again, they might. Especially if he threw the simulation to let the U.S. win.
But was this a request he could turn down?
Before he could ask, Maggie returned with the coffee. Glad for the interruption, Zeus took the cup, then fussed over how hot the liquid was, waving his hand over it.
“As I was saying, we have a few VIPs coming today, and we’d like them to see the simulation in action.”
“Ordinarily General Cody deals with VIPs.”
“Yes, but the general won’t be here today. He has business elsewhere.”
So I have to take one for the team, thought Zeus. He sipped his coffee, waiting for Doner to drop the other shoe. But Doner didn’t say anything.
“Well, okay,” said Zeus finally, standing up. “Guess I better go get myself ready then.”
“There is a little more to it.”
Here it comes, thought Zeus, sitting back down.
“We’re going to use Scenario One—Lightning War.”
“Okay,” said Zeus. The scenario called for war in the very first round, a condition that generally favored Red.
“Thing is, I’d like you to take Blue.”
“You want me to be Blue?” said Murphy. He tried to keep his voice level, but his relief still came through.
“General Perry is pretty much convinced that there’s no way for Red to lose. I don’t blame him, given the results over the past year.”
“A year? I thought we were the first to use it.”
“Officially, yes. But I had it in beta before you got here. I’ve run this scenario for a while, Zeus. In different guises. If Red plays smart, it takes over Asia. The other scenarios are much more balanced, but this one always stacks the deck.”
“And here I thought I was a brilliant strategist.”
“You’re not bad.” Doner gave him another of his crooked smiles. “You’re good, in fact. But the deck is stacked. Not on purpose,” the colonel added hastily. “Red Dragon is as close to real life as we can get. Except for that bit you pulled about San Francisco.”
“I think the Chinese would definitely try that,” said Zeus.
“Maybe. But they’d never get into the harbor that easily.”
Murphy had used civilian airplanes and cargo ships—allowed under the game rules—to sneak an advance force into the city, paving the way for a larger conventional attack. Neither side was theoretically at war yet, which made the surprise tactic even easier to pull off. It was exactly the way things might start, Murphy knew—the twenty-first-century equivalent of Pearl Harbor.
“So I’m today’s sacrificial lamb, huh?” Murphy got up. “I’ll go down quickly.”
“No, no, play hard. Play as hard as you can. Play to win. Definitely play to win.”
“But the deck is stacked, right?”
Doner shrugged. “Play as hard as you can.”
Even with the most conventional strategies, Blue’s position in Asia was hopeless if war was declared in the first round. There was simply no time to get troops there, and no reliable ally to stop Red early enough to keep it from achieving its objective. No matter what Red’s immediate tactical goals were—Taiwan, Japan, Indochina, even Australia—Blue could never rally its forces quickly enough. In fact, any response in force ran the risk of leaving it so weak that Red was positioned to launch a successful invasion of the U.S. mainland.
“Complete naval blockade, Day One,” said Rosen, whom Murphy had tagged as his chief of staff, by rule his main collaborator in the day’s session. “You build up the walls on the West Coast, and hang on.”
“That loses. They get whatever they want, game over.”
Murphy rose from the console. The simulation played out on a large 3-D map projected from a table in each game room, as well as smaller laptop devices all interconnected through a wireless network. The table was really a very large computer screen that made use of a plasma technology to create stunningly realistic graphics; a viewer watching troops move through the map display could easily believe he was sitting in an airplane.
“Preemptive strike is suicide,” said Rosen. “Griffin tried that against Cody the first week I was here. Led to a nuclear exchange in Month Two.”
Another loss, according to the rules of the scenario.
“Wasn’t what I was thinking.”
“Our best bet is following doctrine, right down the line,” said Rosen. “Be the graceful losers. And make sure winners buy. Who are the VIPs, anyway?”
“Who cares?” Zeus pulled out one of the workstation seats and sat down. The Red Team was across the hall, undoubtedly putting the finishing details on the plan. General Perry would be off with the VIPs, but his chief of staff was Major Win Christian—the valedictorian at West Point Major the year Murphy graduated. Murphy had been in the top half of his class, but nowhere near Christian.
Which suited him just fine. Staying away from Christian had been his basic game plan his four years at the Point, after an unfortunate run-in with his fellow plebe during orientation. Christian was already a favorite of the staff because his father was a graduate and a general, and the incident had given Zeus exactly the sort of reputation no cadet wanted. He survived that first semester, but just barely.
Every time his path crossed with Christian’s following that, whether it was in sports, academics, or social life, inevitably Zeus came off on the losing side.
It would be really nice to clock the SOB today.
“What are you doing?” asked Rosen.
“There’s got to be a solution.”
“That’s what Perry’s been telling his people for the past week and a half, and we still cleaned his clock. Perry has tried everything.”
“Yeah.”
“If there was a solution, Doner would have told it to Perry by now.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know it.”
“Oh, he knows it. He knows everything.”
Zeus pulled up the statistics panel, checking to see the average length of hostility—the amount of time Blue usually hung in before the game was lost by the computer. It was only three months.
Three months.
China would defeat America in an Asian war in three months.
Without nuclear weapons.
If it were World War II, America would be out of the war by March 1942. No reinforcements for the Soviets, no invasion of Africa, Italy, and then Normandy. No atom bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki—Hitler would have gotten the bomb and used it on London after taking Moscow and confining the tattered remains of the Russian army to eastern Siberia.
Maybe he wouldn’t bother using the bomb; he could just starve them out, assuming the U.S. abided by whatever terms the peace treaty with Japan provided. And if the U.S. didn’t, then he’d use it on New York and Washington, D.C., instead. Before turning it on the Japanese.
Correlating simulations to real life was a dangerous and fruitless exercise; the simulations were set up to test different theories and situations. Even if they were supposedly neutral, there was no way to accurately account for all of the variables in real life. Once the shooting started and the fog of war descended, even the best plans usually went out the window.
Still, if real life was even remotely this hopeless, America ought to sue for peace right now.
What would he do if this were real?
Try to get Red to attack the Russians.
“You coming to lunch?” said Rosen.
“Huh?”
“I just asked you twice: Do you want to go get lunch?”
“What we need is a proxy,” said Murphy. He jumped up and walked over to the table. “Someone weak at the beginning of the simulation whom we can build up secretly.”
&nbs
p; “Then let Red use as a punching bag?”
“Something like that.”
“Let’s eat.”
“You go. I have to look at the rules.”
“Hell, you’re going to read the rules? I thought you wanted to win.”
9
Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
Finally, there was nothing left for Josh’s stomach to give up. He rose shakily, furling his fists under his arms.
There were no illusions left for his mind to fool itself with, either. Optimism was absurd. Survival itself might even be out of the question.
Blundering into the village was a mistake, a stupid mistake. Whoever did this could have been waiting. Why did I do it? Do I want to die?
Hell no. I won’t. I won’t.
So do something right. Find a weapon. Find a way out.
If he was going to survive, if he was going to make it through this, he had to act like a scientist. He had to be detached, unemotional, take each step carefully.
Josh alternately scolded and encouraged himself as he searched through the hamlet for things he could use. He told himself to act like a survivor, and a scientist. He went back to each hut, forcing himself to look more thoroughly inside. He didn’t find any more bodies, but he saw more evidence of shootings—blood clotted on the dirt floors, bullet holes. Things he’d missed or ignored earlier—like the broken furniture—were obvious to him now, and told a consistent tale: the hamlet had been attacked, probably massacred, and then hastily cleaned up.
Josh looked for weapons in the huts. He found a pair of hunting knives, and ammunition for a rifle, but not guns. He took the bullets, hoping he might find the gun, and continued his search. It was difficult to be as empirical as he wanted—his fingers trembled just clutching the box of loose shells. But he was calmer than before, more aware of his surroundings and himself.
At some point, he slipped his hand into his pocket and took out the camera that had been in his pants since the night before. He began videoing everything, beginning with the person in the darkness of the empty cottage. At first he narrated what he was doing, giving the date and the rough location. Then he just let the camera record.
