by Larry Bond
The broken butterfly. Distraught beauty.
Lost love.
Jing Yo left the room and found the bathroom. He decided to take a shower. When he was finished, he sat on the edge of the tub for a while, breathing in the fading mist of the hot steam. Then he got dressed, and went back into the house.
The tailor was waiting for him in the kitchen, sitting at a brown table made of tin. It was old and battered, but its simple lines filled the space perfectly.
“You are hungry,” said the tailor. “Would you like eggs?”
“Is it breakfast time?”
“It is breakfast for you.”
* * *
Jing Yo spent the afternoon doing exercises and meditating. That evening, the tailor told him he was going out.
“It is not safe for you to be on the street,” the tailor warned. “You must stay in.”
Jing Yo agreed. Still, as soon as the tailor left, he was tempted to go and take a walk on his own.
He stayed away from the windows, but from what he saw and heard he could tell that he was in a city. He wondered what was on the streets outside, but he stayed put, not because he was worried, but because he assumed this was some manner of test.
Until he was feeling better, it made no sense to invite difficulty. Patience was the rule and the way.
When the tailor returned a few hours later, he found Jing Yo sitting cross-legged on the floor of the living room.
“You have watched television?” asked the tailor.
“No.”
“I have a package for you.”
He disappeared into the back room. When he returned, he had a thick manila envelope in his hand. He gave it to Jing Yo, then went back to the kitchen so Jing Yo could examine it in privacy.
Inside was twenty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. There were six credit cards, all with different names. Two of the names matched driver’s licenses. There was a passport that matched another.
There was also a single piece of paper with an address printed neatly at the top. It was on a county highway in Forthright, Ohio.
Jing Yo returned the contents to the envelope. He was folding it over when the tailor returned, carrying a bottle of Oban Scotch. He had two glasses. He put them on the marble coffee table, and poured two fingers’ worth into each glass.
Jing Yo stared at him. The tailor took one of the glasses, waited for a few seconds to see if Jing Yo would join him, then held the glass up and took the smallest of sips.
“When one lives in the world, one must sometimes adopt its customs,” said the tailor as he sat on the couch.
It was his way of explaining why he drank the alcohol, Jing Yo realized. Alcohol, though not specifically forbidden, was frowned on by the adepts.
The tailor looked at him, perhaps expecting Jing Yo to speak. When he didn’t, he reached again for the glass and took another sip, this one slightly larger.
“I expected to be called back,” said Jing Yo. “Or punished. My mission failed.”
The punishment for failure was forfeiture of his life, though Jing Yo saw no need to mention this.
“I am not a judge. I have no say. I do not know anything about your future,” added the tailor. “Do you require further aid?”
“No.” said Jing Yo. “I will leave in the morning.”
The tailor nodded. He took another sip, and now the glass was almost empty. Jing Yo took a deep breath, and went back to meditating.
5
Hanoi
The incident in the hotel had changed Zeus’s view of Hanoi. Until now he had seen it as a city pulling together under attack, the citizens responding to the government’s call for order and sacrifice. Now he saw it not just under siege, but on the point of descent into darkness and insanity.
Outside, the scent of burning metal seemed to have been replaced by the scent of desperation—a thin, powdery ash that stung the nose and settled on lips and teeth, inescapable. A buzz rose from the streets, a hum just audible to his ears—a million whispers together, words of fear and desperation, questions of how to survive, how to escape.
There would be no escape for Hanoi. The Chinese divisions to the southwest were massing to ford the swollen wetlands in Hoa Binh. They would get through, just as Zeus knew they would when he had mapped the successful plan to stall them.
Then they would sweep down to the south. Once they gathered momentum, there was little the Vietnamese could do to stop them. The Chinese would march on Hue, aiming to confront the two divisions the Vietnamese had moved there in the past few days. The Chinese would meet them with at least three divisions of armor, and twice as many infantrymen. The geography would limit their attack, but the Chinese numbers and air support would inevitably force the issue in their favor.
Or maybe they would take a more difficult route, swinging to the west, bypassing Hue and the Vietnamese forces temporarily in favor of a strong, quick rush to Ho Chi Minh City. Zeus had once favored that approach himself, during the Red Dragon war games that had prepared him for this.
Or he’d thought prepared him. Simulations could only teach you certain things about strategy and how to place forces. They couldn’t teach you what you really needed to know about war, how it stung your eyes, how it soured the taste in your mouth.
How it threatened to hollow out your head.
Zeus suppressed his shock as he drove up to the gate at the Vietnamese army command complex and saw that there was only a single guard. The army had a severe manpower shortage, but leaving security light here was suicidal—a lightning strike by a SpecOp unit against the top generals would hasten the country’s collapse.
Granted, the Chinese had neither demonstrated any bold thinking in their attacks to this point, nor had they made much use of special operations units. Their attacks so far had been utterly pedestrian, an outgrowth of the decades’ long concentration on the military as a defensive force. This approach, and the hard fetters of tradition, were all that kept the ragtag Vietnamese forces alive, in Zeus’s opinion.
He took out his military ID and the pass signed by General Trung as he approached the lone sentry. The soldier came over to the car—Zeus had borrowed it from the embassy the day before—then with a glance waved him on. By now, he was well known in the complex.
Zeus drove the small Nissan down the long road toward the concrete building that housed the entrance to the complex. He parked near a pair of old troop trucks—Russian equivalents of the famous American deuce and a half—got out, and went to the door of the small structure housing the entrance.
It wasn’t until he had descended to the first basement that he saw a guard. The man eyed him for a moment, then gave the slightest bow in recognition.
* * *
General Trung stared at the large map spread out on the table of the conference room. The map was new, its surface bare—no markings to show either the forces arrayed against him or the units he had to oppose them.
He had ordered his aide to take the satellite photos and other data the Americans were providing and hold it off to the side. He was thankful for their help, but the reams of information they supplied could be distracting.
Trung wanted simply to look, not at the map, but at the terrain it represented. He used the paper and its shades only to remind him of the physical facts—the way the jungles ran to the highlands, the way the delta flooded.
His predecessors had fought over these same roads and paths, along the same rivers. Their enemies had been, if anything, mightier than the Chinese arrayed against him. France, the United States itself—these were world powers. The Chinese were a regional force, unable to project power much beyond their own borders.
But they were here now, and far more dangerous than the Americans or French. Their proximity made it easy to add supplies and reinforcements. And the Chinese leader saw Vietnam as a place that could solve many of his problems. Its rice and wheat would be welcome, its oil a boon. And the war offered a diversion from his country’s growing problems.
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Once self-sufficient as the world’s largest producer of wheat, China now barely made enough to feed half its population. It couldn’t buy enough from other countries to make up the difference. The story was the same with rice and corn. Ironically, the climate changes that had brought sustained droughts to China had showered good fortune on Vietnam, extending its growing seasons and making more land arable. Thanks partly to new hybrids and improved farming methods, the Vietnamese had been able to capitalize on climate change. Their economy, small as it was, had boomed before the Chinese attacked.
Three weeks before, Trung lit incense at an altar in honor of his ancestors, thanking them for helping him see this prosperity. Now he felt as if they had turned their back on him.
Pham, one of his intelligence aides, appeared at the door.
“General, the American hero, Major Murphy, has returned.”
Trung nodded. The words were not an exaggeration, Murphy was in fact a hero—he had helped deter two major Chinese attacks. The people owed him a great deal, even more so because he was an American.
Trung owed him as well. The young man had a supple mind for battle. And his presence meant that the Americans would continue to take an interest in Vietnam. Trung’s spies had confided that General Perry had lost faith in the Vietnamese; Zeus Murphy was their last hope.
It was a shame. He liked the young American. In many ways, he reminded Trung of the son he had lost many years before. And he would not wish the road ahead on anyone, let alone someone he was fond of.
* * *
“General Trung, thank you for seeing me,” said Zeus, striding into the room.
“It is always a pleasure,” said Trung softly.
“I’m ready to review the plans.”
“You are here at General Perry’s request?”
“I’m here on my own.”
Trung nodded.
Zeus leaned over and looked at the map. It was a simple rendering of the terrain. There were no legends on the maps, not even the names of the cities. But then most likely they would have been in Vietnamese anyway.
“Your images and the intelligence from the embassy are there,” said Trung, pointing to a pile of folders and papers at the side the room.
Zeus picked them up and started thumbing through them. Nothing important had changed. The opportunity was still there.
“I think we can do it,” he told Trung finally.
“I will bring in my lieutenants.”
* * *
A half hour later, Zeus walked fourteen Vietnamese commanders and their aides through a plan to attack north along the road to Malipo, China. He had first conceived of the idea a few days before. It had evolved considerably since then, but the core idea remained the same: strike the Chinese where they didn’t expect to be hit, and use this action to undermine their confidence. If the Chinese acted the way they had acted before, they would halt their offensive, reinforce their lines, and then attempt to regain their territory. It was a stalling action, but it would gain the Vietnamese at least another week.
American satellite images showed that the Chinese had left only a token force in the mountains in the sector below Malipo, concentrating their attack to the east and west. There were good reasons for this. First, the Vietnamese had themselves committed the bulk of their forces to face the two-pronged Chinese attack. Aside from a home guard unit scattered in the hills at the border, there was nothing here to threaten the Chinese.
The Chinese had about a battalion’s worth of troops—they were actually drawn from two different units, according to the signals intelligence—near the border below Malipo, spread out in the mines around Huashan. That force controlled the main road north. Given that the surrounding area was mountainous, any commander preparing defenses would not think he had much to fear.
But examining the satellite photos, Zeus had realized that it would be possible to bypass those strongholds by moving west in Vietnam, crossing through a shallow stream in a mountain pass, and then cutting across to the highway via a narrow but passable pair of roads north of Chuantou. (The city was on the border between the two countries and held by a regiment-sized infantry force. What the unit there lacked in equipment—there were only a few artillery pieces and no visible armor—it made up for in troops. If there was one thing the Chinese had, it was people.)
The stream was dry nearly ten months out of the year. There was only water in it now because of the recent typhoon. The satellite images showed it could be easily forded. The roads were rough but even easier to travel. The trick would be to do all of this unseen. Zeus figured that it would take several hours to get a large force through the mountain passes and onto the highway.
Once they were on the highway, they would be around the main defense in that area. They could take Malipo with only a token fight.
Hubris—that was the Chinese problem. They didn’t think the Vietnamese were capable of striking them. It was the age-old mistake.
Controlling Malipo would give the Vietnamese access to the valleys beyond. In fact, it would expose all of Hunan province, and all of southern China, to attack. There were no sizeable Chinese units or defenses between Malipo and Wenshaw, some thirty-five miles away, though admittedly over very rough terrain. Once an army reached Wenshaw, it could dissect the country at will.
It wasn’t hard for Zeus to imagine a five-hundred-mile romp through the river valleys, hopscotching across the towns and driving deep into Chinese territory. He could have drawn up plans for just such a drive if he was commanding an American force: he would have helicopters and all manner of vehicles at his disposal, control of the skies, almost limitless real-time intelligence. He would own southern China inside a week, maybe even less.
True, the terrain was perfect for guerilla warfare—it reminded him very much of Afghanistan, especially in the areas hardhit by drought. But that sort of resistance would take weeks if not months to materialize in the absence of a strong underground network, and by then the army that had passed through would be on to bigger and better things.
But Zeus wasn’t making a plan for an American force. On the contrary, the assault he mapped out would be executed by a force barely two regiments in size, with a handful of armor and no air support. Even the artillery was limited.
Organized around the Vietnamese 15th Regiment, the force had been supplemented with smaller units from several other divisions and pieces of an armored battalion. A total of thirty-eight tanks and about twice as many armored personnel carriers had been cobbled together as a strike force. The tanks were a motley collection mostly of T-54 and T-55s, Russian Cold War models with some upgrades. The same could not be said for the armored personnel carriers, which were BTR-50s and BMP-1s, tanklike vehicles that would have been thoroughly familiar to soldiers fighting during the war with America.
There was one advantage to having such a small force—sneaking through the mountains would be considerably easier than getting, say, a full armored brigade, let alone a division, past Chinese eyes. The key would be timing the crossing to the passage of a Chinese satellite that surveyed the region; fortunately its orbit was well known. Zeus also had data on the Chinese aircraft flights, which showed that there were only two reconnaissance aircraft operating in the area; they tended to fly on a predictable schedule, which he had taken into account.
There was one other key to keeping the force’s existence secret, but Zeus couldn’t share this with the Vietnamese. The Chinese were using a pair of drones for electronic intelligence gathering all along the border. The aircraft picked up signals and transmitted them back to a processing center in Kunming via a satellite system.
Zeus needed information on when the aircraft were operating. There were several ways the aircraft and their operations could be tracked. The exact method likely depended on how resources were being allocated in the theater, something Zeus wasn’t entirely aware of. In any event, the information hadn’t been shared with the Vietnamese for some reason, and Zeus knew better than to tell
them about it.
Even better would be the means of disabling the drones, which could be done if the U.S. would wipe out the Chinese satellites. But that was absolutely something he couldn’t mention to the Vietnamese.
Zeus spent a few minutes going over the plan, elements of which had already been shared with most of the men in the room. As usual, it was impossible to tell how he was being received. To a man, the Vietnamese officers stared intently and without emotion, their eyes fixed on the maps he pointed to. Once in a while, a gaze would stray toward Trung. No matter how much he tried, Zeus never once caught any of the men looking at him.
* * *
Trung watched his men as Zeus wrapped up. He could tell they were doubtful, and there was no reason that they shouldn’t be. The plan was more than a long shot.
His strategy during the first stages of the war had been to delay, to make the Chinese stagnate. That had served them very well during the wars in 1979 and 1984. Once the risk-adverse Chinese commanders met resistance, they stopped and dug in. At that point, the Vietnamese had the advantage—they could attack from the surrounding hills, use their artillery to pound the Chinese, and occasionally strike with small forces at weak points.
But the war this time was different. The Chinese had massed many more men, and come much farther into Vietnam. The Vietnamese had done very well to hold them this long.
He could see the end now. He would take this last chance, and join his ancestors in the process.
The room fell silent. Trung’s aides would not ask Zeus questions. When he had first come to Hanoi, they wouldn’t speak out of a deep prejudice that he was the country’s enemy. Now they wouldn’t talk because he was its hero.
But there was considerable doubt in their eyes.
Trung rose.
“It is a bold but difficult plan,” he told them.
