by Jeff Carlson
“You’re under arrest,” the officer said.
The governor himself hurried into the room once a signal was given that Jia’s people had been secured. He was followed by a Ministry of State Security general. Jia snapped to attention, saluting General Zheng. All of the Second Department troops did the same, except two who continued to aim their submachine guns at Jia’s team.
“Are you mad!?” the governor asked, blustering. Shao Quan was an older man who wore his authority in traditional ways. At seventy-five, Shao was twice as old as anyone else in the room, and his hair was thin and gray on a round head like a nut, browned by the California sun. His business suit was conservative and dark, blue jacket, blue tie.
Jia kept his eyes straight ahead, holding his salute to General Zheng. He knew he could not let his agitation show. He noticed, however, that four of Governor Shao’s personal bodyguards had also entered the room, their assault rifles pointed at the floor.
“You’ve cost us years of work!” Shao yelled. “And for what? Bravado and revenge? You idiot!” He sneered at the insignia on Jia’s collar, perhaps amazed that a colonel could be so ambitious.
Every second you delay us is a chance for something to go wrong, Jia thought.
“Are you killing them!? What are you shooting at the Americans!?” Shao jabbed his finger at Jia’s display screens and then swung his arm toward General Zheng as if incriminating him as well. “Our forces are unready! Do you realize what another war would do to us now?”
“Sir,” Jia said, addressing the general.
Governor Shao continued to yell. “Shut it down!” he ordered the Second Department troops. They hesitated, glancing at Zheng for instructions. Shao’s voice became shrill. “Go! Move! Turn off their computers and take these men to interrogation.”
Shao emphasized the word men in his last sentence, staring at Dongmei. She was the only female in the crowded room. The young woman was still on her knees, like all of Jia’s team except Jia himself, which left her even more helpless. She was shaking, although she hid it well. Dongmei’s face was expressionless and her back was rigid, but her short bangs trembled above her dark eyes.
Shao’s old face was alive with power, and Jia felt revulsion and anger that one of his technicians might be singled out for any reason. He wouldn’t let them abuse her. “Sir!” he said, looking for General Zheng’s eyes.
“It might not be too late to stop the Americans from retaliating,” Shao said. Shao was also speaking to Zheng now, although he sounded as if he was rehearsing for a public statement. “This was a rogue operation that we shut down immediately,” he said. “The perpetrators have already been dealt with harshly.”
General Zheng was in his forties, heavier than Governor Shao and not as sunburnt. His face was equally lined, however, especially around the eyes, which gave him a shrewd, skeptical appearance. He wasn’t interested in Jia or Shao at the moment. He squinted past them at the bank of electronics, his gaze ricocheting from one display screen to another. He was curious. Jia concealed a smile. Governor Shao was the top civilian in the Western Hemisphere, but California was a military state and General Zheng could overrule Shao if he so chose…
Shao pressured him with one word. “General,” he said.
Zheng glanced up and nodded.
“We must be swift,” Shao said, “before there are repercussions. I do not mean only from the Americans, but also from home.”
“Yes,” Zheng said.
The general’s decision was made. He gestured to his troops and several of them rushed toward the computers and display screens. Yi was foolish enough to lean into their path, blocking the first soldier, who struck him in the cheek with the butt of his submachine gun. It drove Yi to the floor. Another man yanked Dongmei to her feet and grabbed her belt buckle, cinching his fist in the top of her pants. The man grunted, not from the effort of pushing at her slim body but from something much heavier inside himself. Lust. There would be no mercy shown to Jia’s team.
Shao and Zheng believed they could somehow make amends for the attack, honoring their nonaggression pact with the U.S. and Canada, in part by making an example of Jia and his technicians.
Too late, Jia thought.
6
The new Cold War was unsustainable. The politicians could posture all they wanted. The reality was that neither side had the resources to maintain their standoff indefinitely. Someone would stumble, and Colonel Jia was among those who believed it might be their own side.
Yes, the Americans had been on the verge of defeat before the cease-fire. Their losses were staggering. But with the end of the fighting, the People’s Liberation Army suffered one of its greatest military defeats. The cease-fire was not a stalemate. It was a horrendous beating because of the price they’d paid just to reach that detente. Their wars had left them with countless veterans and the new Elite Forces like Jia’s Striking Falcons — but every day that passed, their strength bled away a little more.
Even though the two places were seven hundred miles apart, California had been demolished by the nuclear strike on Leadville, Colorado. Every fault line on the West Coast let go. The vast metropolitan areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles were ripped apart. Undersea shock waves brought the ocean over the land. Adding to the struggle, most of California consisted of arid, dry grasslands or outright desert, especially in the south where the Chinese forces were gathered. Before the plague, the Golden State had only been able to sustain its population by an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals that stretched over hundreds of miles, all of which collapsed.
Neither the Russians nor the Chinese arrived in California until the worst of the quakes subsided. They were able to salvage food, fuel, tools, vehicles, and ammunition — but the tools weren’t calibrated for their equipment. The ammunition didn’t fit their weapons, nor did the ordnance work in their artillery or fit their planes. For the short-term, that was fine. Throughout the first weeks of the war, they sent up makeshift squadrons of Chinese pilots in American planes. They advanced their infantry in civilian cars and U.S. Army trucks supported by their own tanks and armor. It had been necessary to press the attack while the Americans were reeling, and the blitzkrieg was a success.
Peace was more difficult. They were outnumbered. Within a month of the cease-fire, the Russians began in earnest to evacuate their people back to their motherland before anyone else entered its borders, leaving behind only fifteen thousand airmen and troops as a check and bargaining chip against the United States. The Chinese themselves drew their occupying force down to half strength, positioning a hundred and fifty thousand Heroes of the People’s Republic against several million Americans.
Since then, the Americans had reestablished only a few pockets of heavy industry, but even that outstripped what the Heroes were able to put together in their battered cities. They didn’t have the power to meet an arms race. Just holding their ground was difficult enough. They needed water. They needed housing. The insect swarms were a fine source of protein, but the bugs made it difficult to grow wheat or rice. They lost as much food as they gained, fighting the ants. They were also ordered to tap the invaluable crude in California’s many oil fields, rebuilding the derricks and refineries. In the meantime, they faced a slow attrition of the pilots and planes lost in every border skirmish.
Jia had not designed the mind plague himself. He didn’t even know the whereabouts of their labs, yet he had been among the officers who suggested such a thing even before their invasion of the United States. The MSS and the Communist Party had nearly a full century of experience with so-called brainwashing, indoctrination, abnormal psychology, neurology, and population control. Under the guise of normal medical research, their weapons programs had also performed extensive studies with Alzheimer’s patients and victims of Parkinson’s disease.
The mind plague was a bloodless weapon, combining several disciplines into one perfect tool. For years, Jia champi oned its potential.
Tonight, he’d become the
one who unleashed it.
Jia had hoped to do better. Ideally, he would have finished his assault before MSS counterintelligence units noticed the steady number of Chinese planes lifting out of Los Angeles under new orders, much less before they traced his signals into the labyrinth of Army bunkers. He’d intended to emerge from this room with the attack over and done with, allowing a superior officer to claim responsibility.
His orders never said who that man would be. He’d guessed it couldn’t be Shao Quan, but it wasn’t impossible that the governor, like Jia, also worked for the Sixth Department. Nearly every officer and politician had been recruited by the MSS in one capacity or another. Among the Elite Forces, even the junior officers also held ranks in the intelligence agency, answering to two masters. Jia had been prepared to obey Governor Shao if Shao met him with the appropriate codes. Instead, it looked as if the compartmentalized nature of the MSS had worked against itself. Jia couldn’t be sure when Shao or Zheng joined the Second Department forces moving against him, but, after the door was smashed in, the best case scenario would have been if General Zheng arrived late, trying to stop the governor from interfering. That was why Jia waited — but Zheng was not part of the conspiracy.
Before the Second Department troops did irreparable damage to his computers, Jia uttered one sentence to the general. “The autumn rain is cold and sweet,” he said.
“Stop!” Zheng yelled.
His troops paused. One of Jia’s display screens lay shattered on the floor. Sergeant Bu clutched a laptop in his hands, and another man had grabbed a handful of cables, yet no more harm was done.
Governor Shao’s brown face jumped with fear as Jia and Zheng stared at each other. “I represent the Communist Party!” Shao said. The old man recognized Jia’s non sequi tur as an MSS directive. He knew what was happening, but he fought it anyway. “I am the governor! You will obey my orders!”
Shao’s bodyguards lifted their rifles only to find half a dozen submachine guns aimed at them. The Second Department troops had reacted with equal speed, and they outnumbered Shao’s bodyguards more than three to one.
“Don‘t,” Dongmei whispered to both sides. Her voice was an odd, lilting counterpoint to the men’s voices.
“Hold your fire,” Zheng said.
“Obey me!” Shao screamed, stabbing his finger at the bank of electronics again. “Shut it down!”
Zheng said, “The rains give way to winter.”
“But winter must always come before the spring,” Jia said, completing the protocol.
The crowded room was still. The laptop in Bu’s hands beeped once, and, on the floor, Yi brought his palm to his bleeding cheek. Somewhere, a headset murmured.
Zheng turned suddenly on the governor. “Take him alive,” Zheng said, indicating Shao — but he dismissed the governor’s bodyguards with the same curt, slicing motion of his hand.
Shao’s men yelled as the submachine guns blazed. One fired his rifle into the knot of black-uniformed troops, toppling three of them. Then it was over. Zheng’s troops restrained Shao as others knelt to tend to the wounded and killed. One soldier screamed and screamed, clutching at the splintered bone shoved through his elbow.
In the swarm of black uniforms, Jia swung on one man in particular. Sergeant Bu had dropped the laptop to bring his own weapon to bear, running forward to shield General Zheng. “Be careful!” Jia shouted. Bu had charged right to the edge of the bodyguard’s gunfire, and Jia’s feelings turned heartsick at the sight of Bu missing a bullet by inches.
Then he realized the danger in showing his emotions.
“You clumsy bastard, I’ll put you in the labor camps if you broke that laptop!” Jia said, finding another reason to berate the other man. Was he overdoing it? No. All of them were shaken, and most of their attention was on the screaming soldier or Governor Shao. “What is your name?” Jia shouted.
“Sir, my duty is to the general,” Bu said, stupidly prolonging the exchange.
Jia almost struck him. He even raised his fist. But in Bu’s dark eyes, Jia saw unmistakable affection and distress. Bu’s heart had also been betrayed by the close-quarters gunfire. In fact, Jia wondered if Bu hadn’t run to protect General Zheng but to save him instead.
Jia turned from his lover, snapping orders to his squad. “Back to your stations. Confirm all contacts. Lieutenant Cheng, you may need to hand your aircraft off to the others if your station is down.”
“Assist them,” Zheng said, directing Bu and two more of his soldiers away from the bloody floor. “Colonel, what else can I do? We need to bring our forces to full alert. You must have other signals to send, too.”
“Sir. Yes, sir. We’ll give those orders now,” Jia said. “With your permission, please allow me to reestablish command over our attacks before I explain.”
“Yes,” Zheng said.
Jia saluted again, admiring Dongmei’s self-control as the Second Department troops helped them reorganize their electronics. She had never seen combat before. Her chest rose and fell against her uniform as she laid one slender hand over her breast, trying to calm herself… but it was the lines of Bu’s shoulders and narrow hips that distracted Jia’s gaze from his team.
The other man truly cared for him. Jia was surprised. He’d thought their relationship was merely convenient. As far as he knew, there was no one else like the two of them in Los Angeles. It had been a pleasure to find Bu Xiaowen even though Jia was ashamed of what they did together. Now he was shamed in a different way to think he’d been rejecting the possibility of something more meaningful. Fortunately, there was no time to brood.
“Colonel, I’ve lost my connection with our UAVs,” Yi reported, and Huojin said, “Sir, there are more enemy fighters scrambling out of Wyoming.”
“My systems are down, sir,” Dongmei said, tapping swiftly at her laptop.
“Have our aircraft hit their targets yet?” Jia asked as he sat down at his own station. It was past time to send new commands to their orbital cameras, and he was worried about Yi’s unmanned aerial vehicles. His team wasn’t running those UAVs directly. Jia didn’t have the manpower. “Call the Air Force units controlling your drones,” he said to Yi.
As he spoke, Jia dared another glance at Bu, who lingered nearby, sorting out the last of the cables on the floor. Usually it had been days at a time before the two of them found an opportunity to talk privately, even a few words here and there. These bunkers were overcrowded. They were on duty at different times. Their physical liaisons had been even rarer, and Jia wondered when the chance would come again.
Then he saw General Zheng watching his eyes.
If ever there was a nation that was primed to endure a holocaust and move against its rivals, it was twenty-first-century China. Even before the end of the world, they were a country of desperate young men.
In the late 1970s, the Communist Party initiated their historic population control laws, the so-called One Child policy. Although widely opposed, the laws had prevented more than 420 million births. One couple, one baby. It was the only way to ensure better education and health care and to revolutionize the People’s Republic from a rural, peasant state into a technological force. Their population had skyrocketed after World War II, leaving the world’s largest nation in danger of collapsing from within. Merely keeping everyone housed and fed became their greatest industry, which was the main reason why they lagged behind other developed countries in the space race, the nuclear race, and in modernizing their armies — but forty years later, the law had changed the People’s Republic in unforeseen ways. Forced abortions and sterilizations were not uncommon as local authorities pursued the severe birth quotas set by Beijing. Many families also elected to abort healthy female fetuses, swayed by a preference for male heirs to carry on their name, their businesses, or their place in society. Girls were subject to infanticide and abandonment.
In most areas there had been many, many more young men than women, sometimes by a ratio as steep as five to one. Gay women es
pecially were ostracized because lesbians might rob China of their wombs. Men faced an enormous pressure to avoid failing their ancestors.
Growing up, Jia Yuanjun didn’t understand there was anything wrong with him. In fact, he noticed he was better than average. He wasn’t weakened by a certain anxiety that affected the other boys in their male-only classes. He was comfortable without girls. They were not. So while the others bickered, looking for something they couldn’t find, Jia was able to focus instead on his studies and his teachers.
His career in the People’s Liberation Army was respectable and covered his basic needs, allowing him to send his small wages home to his parents. A star lieutenant, Jia was approached in his early twenties by the MSS. The intelligence agencies were always looking to recruit overachievers, but by then he’d realized he had a terrible secret. The furtive trysts that so many of his school-age peers engaged in, not only in search of physical relief but also to develop emotional connections, had also been full of dominance games and menace. Boys who were outed were expelled from the military. Perhaps worse, that stain often denied them any high-paying jobs in the cities as word percolated down from the Party of their offense.
There was another risk. Condoms were expensive. Most of his intercourse was unprotected. HIV was rampant in Asia, and if Jia ever tested positive it would be difficult to explain, a death sentence in two ways. There would be no medical care for an officer banished in disgrace.
Nevertheless, he was drawn to his friends despite himself. Was it only luck that kept him from being betrayed? Or was it his true nature that allowed him relationships in which both men became more vulnerable and committed? He was capable of tenderness, which went against their rough, boyish ways. It humiliated Jia that his yin was so strong, but the pull he felt was irresistible. The sex was good. The love was better. Jia had also seen that it was often the most reckless affairs that led one man or the other to anonymously report his partner. Jia was safer for committing to his boyfriends. All of them held each other’s fates in their hands, and yet it tended to be those who felt the most self-disgust who became the cruelest, destroying their lovers.
