by Larry Bond
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 the 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.
“The question is what they do with the force,” said National Security Adviser Walter Jackson, the only other man in the Oval Office. “Threaten Vietnam, or invade. This may just be muscle flexing.”
“You don’t flex your muscles in secret,” said Greene drily.
Carried out in the area traditionally assigned to the Thirteenth Army Group, the buildup involved elements of at least two other armies. It had been very carefully timed to avoid overhead satellites, and the units remained far enough from the border to avoid detection by the few Vietnamese units nearby. The Chinese had been so careful that the analysts had no definitive word on the strength of the buildup, and no images of tanks moving, let alone posted on the border. Their estimates depended on inferences gathered mostly from a few photos of support vehicles and units, signal intelligence, and the disappearance of units from their normal assignments.
Nearly ten years before, the PLA had built vast underground shelters in southeastern China about two hours’ drive from the border. They had been abandoned, seemingly forgotten, until just a few weeks ago. Command elements of the Thirteenth Army had deployed from their headquarters to one of the underground shelters. They wouldn’t have moved alone, and Frost believed there could be as much as a regiment of armor in the shelters, invisible to satellites.
“A regiment of armor,” said Frost. “That could be two hundred and forty, two-seventy tanks. With scouts, and some mobile infantry. And then look there — within a day’s drive, maybe two or three if they’re conserving fuel and get confused on the directions — a mechanized division. And then up here, three to four days — two more infantry divisions, with their armor, and two other regiments of tanks. That’s the entire force of the Thirteenth Army, all four divisions. And, we’re tracking command elements of several other divisions not ordinarily attached to the Thirteenth Army positioning themselves just a little farther away. This is going to be immense.”
Greene stared at the globe at the far side of his office, barely paying attention. He could see Hanoi’s five-pointed circle in the northern corner of the country.
He’d been released from a POW camp there more than forty years ago. He’d felt like an old man then, though he was only in his twenties. Now he really was an old man, and he still felt far younger than he had on that day.
Every day away from that hell was a day blessed.
“George?” said Jackson.
The president snapped to attention, as if woken from a dream. “I have it.”
“Clearly, they’re intending an invasion,” said Frost. “There’s no other explanation.”
“State thinks it’s posturing,” said Jackson, criticism obvious in his voice.
“The question is what we should do about it,” continued Frost.
“We can’t do anything about it,” said Jackson. “It’s just Vietnam. That’s the trouble. The American people don’t care about Vietnam. And the few who do care would like to see it crushed. Payback for what happened to their fathers and grandfathers.”
Greene pushed his chair back and rose from his desk. If anyone in America had reason to hate the Vietnamese, it was he. And yet he didn’t. Not the people, anyway.
“It’s not Vietnam I’m worried about,” he said, walking to the globe in the corner of the room.
And if anyone in America had reason to sympathize with the Chinese, it was Greene. He spoke fluent Mandarin; he’d served there for several years as ambassador and had lived in Hong Kong before that. He still had good friends in Beijing.
China was being affected by the worldwide depression and the violent climate changes more severely than many countries across the globe. After recovering from the recession of 2008–2009, the industrialized West had slipped back into deep recession over the past eighteen months. Consumers and businesses had stopped purchasing Chinese goods. The overheated Chinese economy had literally collapsed. Worse, droughts in the north and a succession of typhoons and overly long monsoon seasons in the west had caused spectacular crop fa
ilures.
The combination was several times worse than what had occurred in 2009 and 2010, and even made the Great Depression look mild. The Chinese people didn’t know what had hit them.
The country’s disruption had helped bring a new premier, Cho Lai, to power. Clearly, the buildup was part of Cho Lai’s plan to solve China’s problems.
Ironically, the severe weather changes had, on balance, helped the U.S. Its northern states suddenly found themselves in great demand as agricultural centers. So much so that suburban backyards in places like Westchester, New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts, were being plowed under and turned into microfarms.
At the same time, the demise of Chinese imports had led entrepreneurs to reopen factories shuttered for decades. Not surprisingly, items related to the environmental crisis were in great demand. A garden hoe fetched nearly seventy-five dollars at Wal-Mart, and the managers claimed never to be able to keep them in stock.
Of course, there had been considerable disruption in the U.S., and much more was expected, but the country’s size and diversity had so far enabled it to avoid catastrophe. For the first time in two generations, the balance of payments with foreign countries, including China, had turned in America’s favor.
A good thing, considering the country’s massive debt.
“Telling the Vietnamese what’s going to happen will reveal to the Chinese that they haven’t succeeded in fooling our sensors,” said Jackson. “Long term, that will hurt us. If they improve what they’re doing, then we’ll never see them poised to hit Taiwan. Let alone Japan. Vietnam is just not that important. I’m sorry, but that’s a fact.”
Frost said nothing, silently agreeing. Vietnam just wasn’t important in the scheme of things.
And yet, if China wasn’t stopped there, where would it be stopped?
“When will they be ready to attack?” Greene asked.
“Just a guess.” Frost shook his head. “Several days at a minimum. A week. Two weeks. Honestly, very hard to say — what else are they doing that we can’t see?”
“This will just be the start,” said Greene.
“Probably,” admitted Jackson. “But we have to preserve our options for the next attack.”
Greene frowned, not at his advisers, but at himself. He wasn’t sure what to do. In truth, he seemed to have no choice but to let the Chinese attack. The U.S. was powerless to stop an invasion. And yet it was wrong, very, very wrong, to do absolutely nothing.
“Good work, Peter,” said Greene. “Let’s get the Joint Chiefs up to date.”
5
Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
A hundred men beat their drums in the distance, pounding in a staccato rhythm that didn’t quite manage a coherent beat. It was maddening, torturous — there was almost a pattern, but not quite. The drumming built, settling toward a rhythm, only to disintegrate into chaos.
Josh rolled over. He tried pulling the blankets closer, but they were wrapped so tightly that he couldn’t move. Sweat poured from his body, so thick that he began to choke.
I’m drowning.
Drowning.
He twisted over again, grabbing for his pillow. He remembered the dream, the nightmare memory of the homicide that had changed his life irreparably.
He was choking to death, drowning.
With a sudden burst of energy, Josh jerked upright, pulling himself back to full consciousness. He rose, stepping out of the bushes where he’d dragged himself, exhausted, a few hours before.
His mind emptied of all thought, all emotion and sensation. Josh didn’t, couldn’t, think. He couldn’t even feel the presence of his toes or legs or arms. He simply floated in a void, a vacuum within a vacuum.
And then he felt his legs stinging.
His toes were wet and cold. His ankles felt heavy with fluid. He’d wrenched his right knee, and it throbbed. His right thigh felt like it had been punched by one of the trees he’d run into. His sides burned, as if physically on fire. His right lower rib ached, the pain growing, then easing, with each breath. The muscles at the side of his lower chest — the external oblique anterolateral abdominal muscles, a name he knew because he’d torn them in high school playing lacrosse — sent sharp bolts of pain shrieking across the ribs. His right arm felt numb, his shoulder senseless, his fingers cramped stiff. His neck was wrenched to one side. His jaw had locked closed, his back molars grinding against each other.
Oh, God, I’m alive?
What the hell do I do now?
It was light, either just before or just after dawn. The clouds and thick jungle to the east obscured the sun, making it hard to tell.
Josh pushed himself backward, trying to raise himself into a seated position. His hands slipped into mud and he fell backward, dropping into the water behind him. Caught entirely by surprise — he hadn’t thought he was anywhere this close to the creek — he fell below the surface. He rolled and pushed himself up, gulping the air.
Up. Get up. Move. See what’s really hurt.
He rose, then stepped to a small apron of smooth stones at the edge of the stream. The water was calm here, the current very gentle. He looked behind him and saw that the stream had flooded a wide area, a nook between two low hills on the ridge. The area didn’t look familiar, which might mean it was north of their camp. Or it could mean simply that his brain was too scrambled to remember passing it.
Rubbing his thighs with his hands, Josh looked around, belatedly searching the area for his pursuers. Who were they?
Thieves was the only possible answer, and yet it seemed impossible that anyone would want to rob a scientific expedition. Foolhardy, too — the Vietnamese government had endorsed the project, and even sent two soldiers along with the guides.
Thieves were a rarity in Vietnam, and this wasn’t supposed to be a dangerous area: Dr. Renaldo had said the soldiers were along not as protection, but so the Vietnamese could justify the fee they took from the UN’s grant for administration. “The price of doing business,” said the scientist philosophically before they left Hanoi.
So if it was so safe, who had come and killed most of his expedition?
The Vietnamese themselves? It made no sense.
But then, who would kill an Iowa farm family in a murder apparently patterned after the In Cold Blood killings decades before?
Looking for logic from human beings was illogical and often futile. Josh knew that by heart.
There was a knot in his stomach. He was hungry. He tried to remember what Kerry, the flora specialist, had told him about some of the plants. He’d been far more interested in the curve of her hips and the way her small breasts poked at the light muslin shirt than in the nutritional value of the local grasses and brush.
The nearby bushes were thick with green and pink berries. Josh reached for a bunch of the pink ones, then stopped. They might be poison, or simply unripe.
He could wait, he decided. He wasn’t that hungry.
Josh began walking along the bank of the flooded stream, following the ripples in the water as it moved downstream.
Was it the right direction? He reasoned that as long as he moved downhill, he would be heading toward people, but whether that was really a good thing or not he couldn’t say. The Vietnamese tended to be generous toward strangers, but what if the stream brought him to the people who had killed his friends?
Moving was better than sitting.
He was bruised terribly, and his knee hurt, but none of his bones seemed to be broken.
After an hour or so, the sun battered its way through the clouds and the air turned sweet. After another hour, his aches and bruises melted. Except for the insects and the shape of the trees and bushes, he could have been back at school, taking a summer’s hike in the woods.
Josh figured he’d been walking for nearly three hours when he spotted a small bridge made of bamboo and tree trunks spanning the creek. The bamboo on the bridge was bright yellow, relatively new — maybe in place for only a week or two. One o
f the posts was new as well, a rough-hewn tree trunk stuck into the ground at a slight angle, brown rather than gray like the others.
The bridge connected to a narrow path on both sides of the stream. The jungle was thick on the left, but light filtered through the trees on the right; there was a field beyond.
Josh climbed up the incline to the path, trying to muster his small store of Vietnamese words:
Xin chào!
Hello.
Vâng.
Yes.
Tôi không hiếu.
I don’t understand.
He knew other words. What were they?
Grandfather — Ông. It was an honorific, a tide that the Vietnamese used all the time. It was like saying “sir.”
Other words.
Josh tried to stoke his memory, dredging up full phrases and sentences. Vietnamese had tones that went with the sounds, dramatically altering their meaning — a word could mean a ghost, or a rice plant, or a horse, depending on how it was pronounced.
Ngon. Very tasty. The food is very tasty. Can you call for help.
Can you call for help?
Công an. Công an.
Police.
Depending on whom he met, Vietnamese might be of little use. Most of the residents of the valley were Hmong natives, who didn’t speak much Vietnamese themselves. They were poor mountain people, still very close to their roots as nomadic, slash-and-burn farmers.
The trail looped back around the side of a hill, then continued through a patch of jungle. Josh walked steadily, sticking to the side of the trail so he could jump into the grass and hide if he heard anyone. As he turned a corner, he saw a cluster of thatch-roofed huts on the opposite slope. They were about a mile away, across a steep, rock-strewn ravine.
Josh ran his hand over the slight stubble of his morning beard. Would the people help him?
Yes, he decided. They must. They would. He began trotting down the path, trusting that it would curve back toward the hamlet.
