Shadows of War - [Red Dragon Rising 01]

by Larry Bond

  That wasn’t really what she was doing, either. She would bring that up, but the matter was really a second-string cover story, to be used to placate the Vietnamese if they got very nosy. His real assignment was considerably more delicate.

  The agency wanted to plant listening devices in the area to spy on the Chinese—without Vietnamese cooperation—and Fleming had been asked to survey possible sites. Mara was supposed to see how things were going.

  Though planned months before, the mission had taken on extreme significance because of recent Chinese troop movements nearby. The intelligence about those movements was so sensitive that Lucas couldn’t even tell Mara about them. If he did, and she somehow was captured, by the Chinese or the Vietnamese, America’s intelligence-gathering capacities would be severely compromised.

  That wasn’t going to happen, Lucas thought to himself. Basically, the assignment was a long, late dinner, with maybe some cocktails later on. Fleming would be in Hanoi for only a day, dropping off some snail mail and picking up supplies before heading back by truck to the survey area.

  “The border area between the two countries is sensitive, as always,” added Lucas. “So ask him about it. The more information you can get, the better. Check in when you get there. Yada yada yada; you know the drill.”

  “Don’t talk to locals?”

  She was referring to the CIA bureau in Vietnam. Lucas hesitated. He trusted Mara, and knew she was connected to the problems there, but wanted to tell her only what was absolutely necessary.

  “You should not talk to the locals, no,” he told her.

  “Not at all?”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay. If I have problems I check in here?”

  “Absolutely. You think you can handle all this?”

  “In my sleep.”

  “Let’s try it awake, just for practice.”

  ~ * ~

  7

  Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China

  The path Josh had taken swung back into the jungle for roughly a mile before starting to descend along the valley. It wove a zigzag path downward, the cutbacks easing, though not completely eliminating, the angle of the slope. The bottom of the valley was not a river as Josh had first supposed, but rather a road; though not paved, it was much wider than the path, with tire tracks that looked relatively fresh. Yellow dirt and silver-white rocks lined the bed; the shoulders were rutted grass and occasional ditches.

  He couldn’t see the village from where he was, and had lost his sense of which way it would be.

  A monkey screeched in the distance. Another joined in, then another. The sound rattled Josh, seemingly vibrating in his teeth. He decided to go left.

  What was the word for hello?

  Xin chào!

  Can you speak English?

  They would know right away that he was an American, smell it before they even saw him—Americans and Europeans smelled like the soap they washed their bodies with. His clothes, his haircut, his face, his manner—everything about him would make it obvious.

  They would know he was an American and they would help him get back to Hanoi.

  Good God, had it all been a dream? How could it be possible that robbers had come in and murdered the whole camp? What strange twist of fate was this, to have to endure two massacres in a lifetime?

  What luck was it to have escaped both times?

  Josh heard chickens clucking ahead. His heart pounded even harder.

  “I need help,” he mumbled to himself, rehearsing. “My friends have been killed.”

  He started to run.

  “I need help,” he said louder. “I need help.”

  He turned the corner. The chickens, a dozen of them, were scattered in and along the road. When they saw him they moved toward him excitedly.

  The buildings sat above an elbow in the road at his right. Josh began running toward them, looking for people.

  “Help!” he shouted. “I need help!”

  Two cottages sat very close to the road. Both were one-story, windowless structures made of wood. Their steeply pitched roofs paired wood and sheets of rusted tin in a patchwork that seemed more artistic than functional. A slanted fence used for drying clothes stood to the right of the closest one; two large sheets and a man’s pants hung on it, flapping in the wind.

  “Hey!” yelled Josh. “Help! I need help!”

  He ran up the path, along the front of the house to the open door.

  “Please,” he yelled. “Please.”

  He slowed as he neared the door, then stopped.

  “Help!” he shouted. “Hey! Hey!”

  Inside, the house was dark. There was a table and chairs on his left, a primitive stove beyond them. Bedding was laid out on the right.

  A loud moo startled him—the only inhabitant was the family’s cow, its long oval eyes blinking at him from the corner.

  Josh had been raised on farms, but the cow being in the house unsettled him. The animal mooed again, and Josh took a step backward, unsure of himself.

  Perhaps everything was a dream, a nightmare that extended all the way back to his childhood.

  Moooo.

  The sound was more grunt than moo. The animal followed him out. It wasn’t a cow but an ox.

  It wouldn’t be unusual for a family to keep their animals in the house with them if they were very poor.

  There was a noise behind him. Josh swung around, expecting to see a person. But it was a monkey.

  The animal made a face at him, then ducked past into the house. It ran into the shadows at the side, scampering around among some furniture, then emerged with what looked like a potato, its white flesh revealed by the animal’s chiseled bite mark. The monkey shot by and scampered into the jungle, chattering as it ran.

  “Hey!” yelled Josh. “Is anybody around? Hey? Hey!”

  No one answered. The ox looked at him quizzically.

  “Hello? Hey! Hello! Where is everyone!” shouted Josh, twisting around. “Can you help me? I need to get in touch with the authorities. I’ve been robbed.”

  There was no one in the house next to the first, either. Walking up to a second cluster of buildings, he found a small shack set just off the clearing, at the side of what appeared to be a garden. It reeked of dung. He stuck his head inside, saw nothing except for a pile in the corner, then retreated, gasping for fresh air.

  Josh wondered whether it might be market day. The people didn’t seem to have left in a hurry; there were no plates on the tables, no food in the pots, no possessions seemingly left for the moment. He walked in a circuit around the settlement, calling, expecting someone to answer at any second. As each minute passed, he became more optimistic, more set in the opinion that the villagers had gone off to either their chores or some nearby event. Finding them was only a matter of time.

  The hamlet was wedged into the hillside, and his circuits took him up and down the incline flanking the road. Cleared but unplanted fields lay above and below the houses.

  He was hungry. If the people didn’t mind a monkey stealing their food, they surely wouldn’t begrudge him. He’d pay them back, as soon as he was rescued.

  Josh walked to a hut next to the lower field. It was built directly into the slope at the back, but otherwise was just like all the others, its large roof extending below the walls. He ducked his head to get through the door, then stood just inside the threshold for a few seconds as his eyes adjusted.

  The area to the left was used by the family to sleep; the bedding was disheveled, piled haphazardly. Some of the blankets were rolled against the wall. There were clothes nearby. Josh walked over, staring at the dark shapes.

  A set of sandals sat neatly at his left, next to a folded pair of pants and a cone-shaped hat. Josh bent to examine the hat. As he did, he glanced at the corner of the room. The shape of the blankets caught his eye, and for a moment he thought they were a body. He turned away quickly, but then curiosity forced him back.

  It’s not a body. It’s j
ust the weird way the blankets are.

  There was definitely a blanket; the shape had a fold and curled furls. But it did look like a body.

  He took a step toward it, his mind insisting his eyes were wrong.

  It’s not a body.

  And then his mind admitted what it saw: a dark black stain in the middle of the tan covering. It was definitely a body, wrapped in the blanket where it had been shot, thrown against the side of the house by the force of the bullets striking it.

  Josh bolted from the house, his stomach turning.

  ~ * ~

  8

  Carlisle, Pennsylvania

  Zeus Murphy gunned his Corvette away from the sentry post, spitting gravel as he exercised the classic Chevy’s engine.

  “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore,” said his passenger, Steve Rosen.

  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.”