by Larry Bond
Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Opportunity
1 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
2 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
3 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
4 - Washington, D.C.
5 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
6 - Bangkok, Thailand
7 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
8 - Carlisle, Pennsylvania
9 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
10 - National Security Situation Room, White House
11 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
12 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
13 - Hanoi, Vietnam
14 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
15 - Beijing, China
16 - Hanoi
More Indian Cities Abandoned
Family Farm Expands Again
Ford Announces 90-Miles-Per-Gallon Hybrid
Danger
1 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
2 - Northern Vietnam
3 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
4 - Northern Vietnam
5 - Carlisle, Pennsylvania
6 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
7 - Bangkok
8 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
9 - Northern Vietnam
10 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
11 - Northern Vietnam
12 - Bangkok
13 - Washington, D.C.
14 - Bangkok
15 - Northern Vietnam
Oil Exports Down, Revenue Up in Malaysia
UN Begs Fresh Relief Effort in South America
Non-Rice Paddy Rice Scientists’ Dream
Chaos
1 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
2 - Near Hanoi
3 - Washington, D.C.
4 - Beijing
5 - Western Vietnam
6 - Bangkok
7 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
8 - Northern Vietnam
9 - Northwestern Vietnam
10 - Northern Vietnam
11 - Northwestern Vietnam
12 - Northern Vietnam
13 - Beijing
14 - Western Vietnam
15 - Northwestern Vietnam
16 - The Pentagon
17 - Northwestern Vietnam
18 - Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
19 - Northwestern Vietnam
20 - Northwestern Vietnam
21 - Northwestern Vietnam
22 - Bangkok
Electronics Giant Stai-On Declares Bankruptcy Amid Japan Electronics Downturn
Congo Brushfire Spreads; Smoke Plume to Affect Climate Through Rest of Year
Survivor
1 - Northwestern Vietnam
2 - Northwestern Vietnam
3 - En route to Thailand
4 - Northwestern Vietnam
5 - Washington, D.C.
6 - Northwestern Vietnam
7 - Washington, D.C.
8 - Hanoi
9 - Western Vietnam
10 - Washington, D.C.
11 - Northwestern Vietnam
12 - Northwestern Vietnam
13 - Hanoi
14 - Northwestern Vietnam
15 - Northwestern Vietnam
16 - Northwestern Vietnam
17 - Northwestern Vietnam
18 - Northern Vietnam
19 - Bangkok
20 - Northern Vietnam
21 - Noi Bai Airport, Hanoi
22 - Northern Vietnam
23 - Northern Vietnam
24 - Northern Vietnam
25 - Northern Vietnam
26 - Northern Vietnam
27 - Northern Vietnam
28 - Northern Vietnam
29 - Northern Vietnam
30 - Northern Vietnam
31 - Northern Vietnam
32 - Northern Vietnam
Personal Chronicle: Looking Back to 2014 …
February 2014
Major Characters
Forge Books by Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice
Copyright Page
This past spring, we were honored to visit the Center for the Intrepid and the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. We were humbled by the men and women we met there, veterans who have sacrificed themselves for our freedom and way of life. Some of them were badly wounded in the flesh, yet all were steadfast in spirit.
This book is dedicated to them.
Third world countries, especially those in Southeast Asia and Africa, will feel the brunt of the unpredictable climate changes. Abrupt shifts in long-standing weather patterns will bring turmoil and chaos to already strained economies and societies … .
—International Society of Environmental Scientists report
Opportunity
1
Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
The sneeze rushed him out of the dream, squeezing away the black shadows he’d been running through. It didn’t quite wake Josh MacArthur up, however—the second sneeze did that, shaking his body so violently that he knocked over the small radio near his sleeping bag. He rolled over and slipped to the edge of the mattress before the third sneeze, trying to bury his face in his arm to muffle the noise. This was only partly successful, and Josh, worried that he would wake the rest of the team, grabbed the cover of his sleeping bag and stifled the next sneeze, and the next.
When he was finally able to take a good breath without sneezing, Josh rose to his knees and crawled to the side of the tent, looking for the small plastic box with his antihistamines. After a bit of patting around he found it, but it was too dark inside the tent to sort through the pills—he carried two types, of similar sizes but different strengths. He wanted the one more powerful at nighttime, not caring that it would make him drowsy.
His flashlight had rolled away somewhere when he knocked over the radio, and he couldn’t see it. Finally he decided to go outside and walk to the clearing, where the moonlight might be strong enough for him to tell the difference between the blue and green pills; it would also give him a chance to relieve himself. He grabbed his jeans from the edge of the cot and pulled them on. Remembering the snakes he’d seen during the day, he shook out his boots before putting them on, then took his sweatshirt from the base of his camp bed and went outside.
The moist mountain air provoked another sneeze.
Josh cursed his sinuses silently and walked over to the open area where they’d made a fire the previous evening. It was reduced to dead ashes now, but there was enough open space for the moon to shine full; he could see not only his hands but the cuts across his palm. He opened the pillbox and sorted through its contents, worried he would sneeze again and spill them in the dirt, where they might be lost forever. Finally he found one he was convinced was green—one of the strong ones—and popped it into his mouth.
He swallowed, grimacing at the bitter taste the pill left in his throat. Then he moved toward the bushes and trees a few yards away to find a place to pee.
Northwestern Vietnam was not the best place for a man with allergies, but MacArthur hadn’t considered his body’s foibles when he decided on his career as a weather scientist, nor had he thought about it much when he chose his doctoral thesis topic, the impact of rapid climate change on Asian mammals. Vietnam was not only a good place to study his subject; there was actually money available to fund the research, since few scientists wanted to go to such a
distant place when there were ample topics in the developed world. These days, one could study the effects of climate change and still sleep in a hotel bed at night.
But Vietnam, snakes and all, offered other consolations. The mountains and valleys of the north were breathtakingly spectacular. And while they had been greatly affected by the rapid changes in the world’s weather that had occurred over the last five years, the changes were much more benign, and even beneficial, than those elsewhere.
One of the changes meant it was slightly wetter and warmer in February than it ordinarily would have been just five years before. But warmth was relative—MacArthur pulled on his sweatshirt and rubbed his hands together, trying to ward off the chill as he looked for a suitable place to relieve himself.
The young scientist had just found a large rock when he heard something pushing through the scrub to his right. He froze with fear.
A tiger!
Ordinarily they didn’t range quite this far west, but they too had suffered the consequences of climate change, and were expanding their range.
What was he supposed to do? Crouch? Freeze? Run? What had he been told during orientation?
Before his mind could supply an answer, he heard another sound, this one farther away. There were two, no three animals moving through the brush.
A fourth.
They couldn’t be tigers. The cats didn’t hunt in packs.
But this realization didn’t comfort him. Something was definitely there, moving through the vegetation toward the camp.
Thieves?
Someone shouted. MacArthur spoke very rudimentary Vietnamese, and what he heard didn’t match with the words he knew.
There was another shout, and then a very loud and strange popping noise, a bang that seemed unworldly. The whole mountain shuddered, then flashed oddly white.
Then came a noise he did recognize, one he’d heard long ago as a child, a sound that had filled his nightmares ever since—an automatic weapon began rattling behind him, its sound the steady, quick stutter of death. Another joined in, then another and another.
Without thinking, without even looking where he was going, Josh MacArthur took off running in the opposite direction, dodging through the thick brush in the moonlight.
2
Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
Lieutenant Jing Yo stiffened as Colonel Sun Li strode up the hill.
“What happened here, Lieutenant?” said the colonel.
“The intelligence was not good. There were Vietnamese soldiers in the camp. The regular troops panicked and began to fire. We came up from the road as soon as we heard the gunfire. By then, of course, it was too late.”
“They killed them?”
“Yes,” said Jing Yo. “As best I can determine, there were only two Vietnamese soldiers in the camp. The rest were unarmed. It appeared to be a scientific expedition.”
“Science?”
“There are different instruments. It was a UN team.”
Sun frowned. Killing Vietnamese was one thing; murdering international scientists, quite another.
“An expedition?” The colonel’s expression changed as he considered this. “So they were spies.”
Jing Yo shook his head. “Their equipment—”
“They were spies, Lieutenant. If the matter should ever be raised later on. Something that is very unlikely. In the meantime, we still have operational secrecy. That was maintained, for better or worse.”
Jing Yo knew better than to disagree. Colonel Sun was Jing Yo’s superior as head of the commando regiment. More important as far as the present operation was concerned, he was the executive officer to General Ho Ling, the commander of Group Task Force 1, and thus the second-in-command of the army at the spearhead of the campaign to subdue Vietnam. Though still in his early thirties, Sun was as politically connected as any general in the army, as his position with the commandos demonstrated: he was the nephew of Premier Cho Lai—the favorite nephew, by all accounts.
Still, Jing Yo was not a toady or yes-man; Sun would not have had him as a platoon leader and personal confidant if he was.
“I sense from your silence that you disapprove,” said Sun when Jing Yo didn’t answer. “You consider this attack a sign of poor discipline.”
“It does not signify achievement.”
Sun laughed. “Well said, my understated monk.” The colonel practically bellowed. “Well said. But what do we expect of these ignorant peasants? We’ve worn out our tongues on this.”
Sun had, in fact, argued against using regular troops rather than commandos for the secret border mission before the invasion. But General Ho had countered that the tasks could be conducted by regular troops with some guidance. The argument became moot when the central command decided to allocate only one commando platoon—Jing Yo’s—to the mission. They blamed this on manpower shortages, but in truth the decision had much more to do with army politics: central command wanted to limit the commandos’ influence by limiting their glories.
“We’ll have to wipe these idiots’ noses for them before it’s through,” said Sun. “But Vietnam is not Malaysia, eh? We won’t be fighting the CIA here.”
“No,” said Jing Yo. “But we should not underestimate our enemy.”
One of the regular soldiers rushed up from the side of the hill. It was Sergeant Cho, one of the noncommissioned officers who had presided over the massacre.
“Colonel, Private Bai believes he heard someone running up the hill in that direction,” said Cho.
“Lieutenant, investigate,” said Sun. “We do not need witnesses.”
Jing Yo bowed his head, then turned to Cho. “Which way?”
“I will show you.”
“No, you will tell me. My men and I will deal with it.”
3
Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
Josh felt his chest tighten into a knot, the muscles stretched across his rib cage. He knew better than to give in to the pain—he had to flee, escape whoever was pursuing him. The sound of the bullets slashing through the air, the metal thump that shook both sides of his skull, had turned him into something less than human: an animal, scared; a rabbit or something smaller, a mouse.
He ran and he ran, maybe in circles, pushing through the thick brush without a plan. He pushed through thin stalks of growing trees and wide fern fronds, jostling against thicker trees. The pain in his chest spread inward, gripping his lungs, squeezing until he couldn’t breathe.
And still he ran.
The ground tipped upward, sloping in the direction of the mountains. Somewhere beyond Josh the rain forest gave way to bamboo, the elevation climbing to 2,400 meters. But the jungle still ruled here, and the thick, closely spaced trees would have been a hazard even in full daylight. Josh hit against them repeatedly, bouncing off mostly, pushing to the right or left, until inevitably he fell, his balance and energy drained. He rolled on the jungle floor, the cold, damp earth seeming to climb around him.
His heart pounded furiously. He gulped at the air, desperate to breathe. He tasted the leaves and thick moss deep in his lungs. His eyes watered and his nose was full, but he managed to keep himself from sneezing until he could raise his arm to his mouth and muffle the sound with the inside crook of his elbow. He coughed and wheezed, rising to his haunches. Sweat ran down both temples, and his back was soaked. It felt as if every organ, every blood vessel inside his body, had given way, the liquid surging through his pores.
And then he began to retch.
For Jing Yo, each step was critical. To move through the jungle—to move anywhere—was a matter of balance. The difficulty was to make each move lead to another, to choose a step that would lead inevitably to the step ten paces later. When Jing Yo was moving properly, this was how he stepped; when he went forward with the proper discipline, the hundredth step was preordained.
He had spent years mastering this, learning with his mentors as his practice of self-awareness in the days befor
e his induction into the army.
The trouble was not moving through the dark, but moving with the other men, who knew little of balance, let alone Ch’an or the Way That Guides All, often known as kung fu outside China. The commandos on his team were elite soldiers, carefully selected and trained to be the country’s best warfighters, but even so, they were not Ch’an monks nor indoctrinated like them. They walked as soldiers walk, not as ghosts balancing on the edge of the sword.
Jing Yo was the fourth man in the team, the center of a triangle, with Ai Gua at point fifty meters ahead, Sergeant Fan to his left, and Private Po directly behind him. This was not commando doctrine—a spread, single-file line was preferred in this circumstance—but Jing Yo had his own way for many things.
Ai Gua stopped. Jing Yo froze as well, then turned and held out his hands, trying to signal to Po, who didn’t see him until he was only a few meters away; at that point the private fell quickly—and noisily—to his knees.
“Wait,” Jing Yo whispered. “Quietly.”
He slipped forward to Ai Gua. Raised in southwestern China, Ai Gua had hunted from a very young age, and had the judgment of a much older man.
“In that direction,” said Ai Gua, pointing to his right. “Going up the slope.”
“How many?”
“I cannot tell. Just one, maybe. But a noisy one.”
Jing Yo stared at the forest. One man could be more difficult to apprehend than an entire squad.
Sergeant Fan crept close on Jing Yo’s left.
“Where?” Jing Yo asked.
Ai Gua pointed. The sergeant adjusted his night-vision goggles as he scanned the area.
“I see nothing,” he told Jing Yo.
“They are there,” said Ai Gua.
Without even looking at him, Jing Yo knew the sergeant was frowning. In his midthirties, a career soldier from a poor family, Sergeant Fan was a practical man, skeptical by nature.
“Sergeant, take Ai Gua and move in this direction. Private Po and I will go this way and flank our prey.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Remember, we want them alive.”
“Alive?”