Then he realized it was the scent of Western soap.
He turned the rifle in the scent's direction, then heard something moving, stumbling, running.
He rose. A body ran into the left side of the scope, a fleeting shadow.
It would not be useful to kill him, Jing Yo thought. But before he could lower his rifle, a shot rang out.
Â
Â
The bullet flew well above Josh's head,
whizzing through the trees. There was another, and another and another, just as there had been that night when he was a boy.
He'd had many nightmares of that night. His sleeping mind often twisted the details bizarrely, putting him in the present, as a grown man trying to escape, changing the settingâoften to the school or even his uncle's house, where he'd gone to liveâand occasionally the outcome: once or twice, his father and mother, both sisters, and his brothers survived.
But Josh knew this wasn't a dream. These weren't the two people who'd chased him when he was ten, and he wasn't able to end this ordeal simply by screaming and opening his eyes. He had to escape. He had to
run
!
He bolted forward, tripping over the rocks, bouncing against a boulder that came to his waist and then rebounding against a thick tree trunk. Somehow he stayed on his feet, still moving. There were shouts, calls, behind him.
Panic raged through him like a river over a falls. He threw his hands out, as if he might push the jungle away. A tree loomed on his right. He ducked to his left, hit a slimmer tree, kept going. He pushed through a bush that came to his chest.
More bullets.
A stitch deepened in his side. His chest tightened, and he tasted blood in his mouth. The trees thinned again, and he was running over rocks.
Run,
his legs told his chest, told his arms, told his brain.
Run!
Â
Â
Sergeant Fan had fired the shot
that had sent their quarry racing away. Jing Yo yelled at him, calling him an idiot, but then immediately regretted it. Upbraiding an inferior before others, even one who deserved it as Fan did, was not his way.
“Don't let him escape,” said Jing Yo, springing after the runner. “But do not kill him either. We want to know what he knows.”
The forest made it hard to run. Jing Yo realized this was a problem for the man they were pursuing as well as for them, and conserved his energy, moving just fast enough to keep up. Ai Gua and Private Po had moved to the flanks; they had good position on the man if he decided to double back.
He wouldn't. He was panicked, a hare racing from the dragon's claws.
An odd man, to be able to move so quietly, under such control at one moment, only to panic the next. Jing Yo could understand both control and panic, but not together.
His own failing, perhaps. A limit of imagination.
Sergeant Fan fired again. Jing Yo turned to confront the sergeant. This time there was no reason not to speak freely; on the contrary, the circumstances called for it, as the sergeant had not only been careless but disobeyed his direct order.
“What are you doing?” demanded Jing Yo.
“I had a shot. He's goingâ”
Jing Yo snapped the assault gun from the sergeant's hand. Stunned, and wheezing from his exertion, Fan raised his hands, as if to surrender.
“Sergeant, when I give an order, I expect it to be followed. We want the man alive. I said that very specifically. When we return to camp, you will gather your things and report to division. Understood?”
Without waiting for an answer, he spun back to the pursuit.
Â
Â
Josh didn't hear the water
until he was almost upon it. His first thought was that he would race through itâthe soft sound made him picture a shallow brook coursing down the side of the mountain. Then he thought he would wade down it, throwing the men off his trail.
With his second step, he plunged in above his knee. Josh twisted to
the left, but he'd already lost his balance. He spun and landed on his back. Everything was a blur. This was no gentle, babbling brook. Josh fell under the water, bumped back to the surface, then found himself swirling out of control in the current. He flailed wildly, rolling with the water, spinning and alternately sinking and rising up, thrown into a confused maelstrom, gripped by the ice-cold water. He felt dead; no, beyond dead, sent to the frozen waste of some Asian afterlife as a doomed soul forced to endure eternal tortures.
Â
Â
Jing Yo pulled his handheld from his pocket
and punched the GPS preset. The stream did not exist on the map, the cartographers not able to keep up with changes wrought by the rapid climate shifts. Snow in these mountains was a rare occurrence as late as 2008, when a one-inch snowfall in February made headlines. Now the mountain averaged nearly a foot and a half in winter, most of it in late January, a product of shifting wind, moisture, and thermal patterns. The snowmelt produced the stream, and Jing Yo supposed that the streambed would be rock dry or at best a trickle within a few weeks.
Right now, though, it was as treacherous as any Jing Yo knew from his native province of Xinjiang Uygur, where such seasonal streams had existed since the beginning of time.
“He fell in,” said Ai Gua. “He is a dead man.”
Between the swift current and the frigid temperature, Ai Gua's prediction was probably correct. On the other hand, it was just possible that he had made it to the other side.
Jing Yo turned to Sergeant Fan. “Sergeant, take Ai Gua with you and head upstream. See if you can find a good place to cross. Then come back west. Private Po will come with me. This time, do not fire except under my direct order. No one is to fire,” Jing Yo repeated. “No one.”
Jing Yo began walking to the west, paralleling the bank of the stream. The water cut a haphazard channel, at some points swallowing trees, giving them a wide berth at others. It moved downhill, curving into an almost straight line within thirty meters of the spot where they believed their target had gone in.
Jing Yo took the rifle from Private Po, then stepped into the current where he could get a good view downstream. Ignoring the chill that ran up his legs, he moved carefully in the loose stones and mud. Within three steps the water came to his knees. Its pull was strong, trying to
push him down; he tilted his entire body against it as he raised the rifle and its sight to see.
The heat of a body should show up clearly if on the surface of the water, but only there. There was considerable brush on both sides of the stream as it continued downward.
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 bodyâ”
“Leave it. I need you here.”
“We will come immediately.”
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 reasonâthe 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 thereâwithin a day's drive, maybe two or three if they're conserving fuel and get confused on the directionsâa mechanized division. And then up here, three to four daysâtwo 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 2008â2009, 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 failures.
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 sayâwhat 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.”