Shadows of War - [Red Dragon Rising 01]

by Larry Bond

  “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 matter 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.”

  “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.

  After ten minutes, the memory was full. He turned the camera off and put it back into his pocket, continuing to look around the village and the nearby fields.

  Maybe there hadn’t been a massacre here—maybe the villager had been killed by someone in the village. That might explain why everyone had fled.

  He doubted it was true, but it was a plausible, or at least possible, explanation. Josh continued walking around the village and nearby fields, looking for more evidence.

  It wasn’t until he had stared at the upper field for a few minutes that he realized part of it had been turned over, while the one below had not.

  Who would work a field in February?

  Josh sank slowly to his knees. There were footprints—boots. He traced one of the boot marks with his index finger. It was a man’s boot, about his size, perhaps one or two sizes smaller.

  Evidence of what had happened.

  He didn’t need it; he’d seen enough.

  There was doubt, though. Just one body.

  If this were a weather event, he would gather as much data as he possibly could. He would leave nothing to chance.

  Josh put his hands into the earth. His heart began throbbing. He pulled the dirt toward him. It resisted. He dug deeper and pulled again.

  After his fourth or fifth pull, the dirt came away easily. Sweat ran down the sides of his neck as he worked.

  Five minutes after he started digging, Josh’s left hand pushed against something that felt like a stick. He pushed a little more, then scooped upward, removing the dirt but not revealing the object. He took as slow a breath as he could manage, and began to dig again, gently though steadily. He moved the dirt around the object like he thought an archaeologist would, bringing it slowly to the surface.

  A thick tree branch.

  An old shirt on a stone.

  An arm, with fingers rolled into a ball.

  Enough.

  Josh took out the camera and erased one of the files he had shot the night before, giving himself about a minute and a half more of video time. He panned the area, then closed in on the arm, focusing on the hand.

  Done, he replaced the dirt with his foot, eyes closed, tamped it back down, and returned to the village.

  ~ * ~

  10

  National Security Situation Room, White House

  “Let’s see the video,“ said President Greene.

  A screen rose slowly from the middle of the table of the secure situation room. Over in the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs turned their attention to a similar display at the front of the large secure room there.

  A news clip began to play. China’s Premier Cho Lai was speaking to a crowd of over one hundred thousand packed into Tiananmen Square. His face was red, his hand motions emphatic.

  His words were translated in English subtitles on the screen. Though literally correct, the translation did not quite catch the nuances of venom and racism.

  Greene caught it all. His Chinese was fluent, and he needed no help in deciphering the full implication of Premier Cho Lai’s words. The message could be summed up in one word: war.

  Though that was a word the premier never used.

  “We must recover the dignity of the Chinese people, sullied too long by those inferior to us, those with despicable agendas, those with goals we cannot share,” declared Cho Lai. The premier paused to listen as the crowd erupted in applause.

  Greene shook his head. Despite what his critics and late-night comics sometimes implied, the president wasn’t old enough to have heard Hider’s speeches firsthand, but he knew they sounded something like this.

  “You can turn it off. Peter, review the intelligence, please,” Greene told CIA Director Peter Frost.

  Frost began speaking, detailing the Chinese buildup as he had earlier for the president and national security adviser. Everyone sitting in on the briefing, both at the Pentagon and at the White House, had heard or seen at least some of the intelligence Frost reviewed. Nonetheless, the CIA director’s pithy summary placed the situation in stark relief, and to a person they seemed surprised, and deeply troubled.

  “We’re looking at World War III here,” said the chief of staff, Army General Clayton Fisk. “First Vietnam, then the rest of Asia. India— they won’t stop.”

  Fisk gets it, thought Greene. Finally.

  One American convinced. Another 350 million to go.

  “Maybe they take the country in a few months,” said the Air Force chief, Tarn Washington. “Or maybe they get bogged down there like we did in the 1960s. Maybe they don’t even attack. The Chinese have a habit of moving troops to their borders. Look what they did at Myanmar a couple of years ago. They’re bullies, but they don’t actually want to stub their toes, let alone get bloodied.”

  “The question is, how can we stop them?” said Admiral Nancy Gilead, the Navy head. “If that’s what we want to do.”

  “We can’t,” said Fisk quickly. “We can’t get troops there. And frankly, the American people would never stand for it. Never.”

  Secretary of State Theodore “Tad” Knox nodded his head vigorously.

  “How long before they invade?” asked Fisk.

  “If they invade,” said Washington.

  “The analysts’ best consensus is that they’
re a week away, maybe two, from being in a position where they can attack,” said Frost. “It’s a guess though.”

  “It could be sooner?” asked Fisk.

  “Possibly.”

  “With all due respect, I have to disagree,” said General Peter Shoemaker. Shoemaker headed the Army. “The Chinese are a notoriously slow-moving army. They could take months getting into position—and a half a year going over the border. Especially in western Vietnam. Their history is against them.”