“Are you mad!?” the governor asked, blustering. Shao Quan was an older man who wore his authority in traditional ways. At seventy-five, Shao was twice as old as anyone else in the room, and his hair was thin and gray on a round head like a nut, browned by the California sun. His business suit was conservative and dark, blue jacket, blue tie.
Jia kept his eyes straight ahead, holding his salute to General Zheng. He knew he could not let his agitation show. He noticed, however, that four of Governor Shao’s personal bodyguards had also entered the room, their assault rifles pointed at the floor.
“You’ve cost us years of work!” Shao yelled. “And for what? Bravado and revenge? You idiot!” He sneered at the insignia on Jia’s collar, perhaps amazed that a colonel could be so ambitious.
“Are you killing them!? What are you shooting at the Americans!?” Shao jabbed his finger at Jia’s display screens and then swung his arm toward General Zheng as if incriminating him as well. “Our forces are unready! Do you realize what another war would do to us now?”
“Sir,” Jia said, addressing the general.
Governor Shao continued to yell. “Shut it down!” he ordered the Second Department troops. They hesitated, glancing at Zheng for instructions. Shao’s voice became shrill. “Go! Move! Turn off their computers and take these men to interrogation.”
Shao emphasized the word
Shao’s old face was alive with power, and Jia felt revulsion and anger that one of his technicians might be singled out for any reason. He wouldn’t let them abuse her. “Sir!” he said, looking for General Zheng’s eyes.
“It might not be too late to stop the Americans from retaliating,” Shao said. Shao was also speaking to Zheng now, although he sounded as if he was rehearsing for a public statement. “This was a rogue operation that we shut down immediately,” he said. “The perpetrators have already been dealt with harshly.”
General Zheng was in his forties, heavier than Governor Shao and not as sunburnt. His face was equally lined, however, especially around the eyes, which gave him a shrewd, skeptical appearance. He wasn’t interested in Jia or Shao at the moment. He squinted past them at the bank of electronics, his gaze ricocheting from one display screen to another. He was curious. Jia concealed a smile. Governor Shao was the top civilian in the Western Hemisphere, but California was a military state and General Zheng could overrule Shao if he so chose…
Shao pressured him with one word. “General,” he said.
Zheng glanced up and nodded.
“We must be swift,” Shao said, “before there are repercussions. I do not mean only from the Americans, but also from home.”
“Yes,” Zheng said.
The general’s decision was made. He gestured to his troops and several of them rushed toward the computers and display screens. Yi was foolish enough to lean into their path, blocking the first soldier, who struck him in the cheek with the butt of his submachine gun. It drove Yi to the floor. Another man yanked Dongmei to her feet and grabbed her belt buckle, cinching his fist in the top of her pants. The man grunted, not from the effort of pushing at her slim body but from something much heavier inside himself. Lust. There would be no mercy shown to Jia’s team.
Shao and Zheng believed they could somehow make amends for the attack, honoring their nonaggression pact with the U.S. and Canada, in part by making an example of Jia and his technicians.
6
The new Cold War was unsustainable. The politicians could posture all they wanted. The reality was that neither side had the resources to maintain their standoff indefinitely. Someone would stumble, and Colonel Jia was among those who believed it might be their own side.
Yes, the Americans had been on the verge of defeat before the cease-fire. Their losses were staggering. But with the end of the fighting, the People’s Liberation Army suffered one of its greatest military defeats. The cease- fire was not a stalemate. It was a horrendous beating because of the price they’d paid just to reach that detente. Their wars had left them with countless veterans and the new Elite Forces like Jia’s Striking Falcons — but every day that passed, their strength bled away a little more.
Even though the two places were seven hundred miles apart, California had been demolished by the nuclear strike on Leadville, Colorado. Every fault line on the West Coast let go. The vast metropolitan areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles were ripped apart. Undersea shock waves brought the ocean over the land. Adding to the struggle, most of California consisted of arid, dry grasslands or outright desert, especially in the south where the Chinese forces were gathered. Before the plague, the Golden State had only been able to sustain its population by an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals that stretched over hundreds of miles, all of which collapsed.
Neither the Russians nor the Chinese arrived in California until the worst of the quakes subsided. They were able to salvage food, fuel, tools, vehicles, and ammunition — but the tools weren’t calibrated for their equipment. The ammunition didn’t fit their weapons, nor did the ordnance work in their artillery or fit their planes. For the short-term, that was fine. Throughout the first weeks of the war, they sent up makeshift squadrons of Chinese pilots in American planes. They advanced their infantry in civilian cars and U.S. Army trucks supported by their own tanks and armor. It had been necessary to press the attack while the Americans were reeling, and the blitzkrieg was a success.
Peace was more difficult. They were outnumbered. Within a month of the cease-fire, the Russians began in earnest to evacuate their people back to their motherland before anyone else entered its borders, leaving behind only fifteen thousand airmen and troops as a check and bargaining chip against the United States. The Chinese themselves drew their occupying force down to half strength, positioning a hundred and fifty thousand Heroes of the People’s Republic against several million Americans.
Since then, the Americans had reestablished only a few pockets of heavy industry, but even that outstripped what the Heroes were able to put together in their battered cities. They didn’t have the power to meet an arms race. Just holding their ground was difficult enough. They needed water. They needed housing. The insect swarms were a fine source of protein, but the bugs made it difficult to grow wheat or rice. They lost as much food as they gained, fighting the ants. They were also ordered to tap the invaluable crude in California’s many oil fields, rebuilding the derricks and refineries. In the meantime, they faced a slow attrition of the pilots and planes lost in every border skirmish.
Jia had not designed the mind plague himself. He didn’t even know the whereabouts of their labs, yet he had been among the officers who suggested such a thing even before their invasion of the United States. The MSS and the Communist Party had nearly a full century of experience with so-called brainwashing, indoctrination, abnormal psychology, neurology, and population control. Under the guise of normal medical research, their weapons programs had also performed extensive studies with Alzheimer’s patients and victims of Parkinson’s disease.
The mind plague was a bloodless weapon, combining several disciplines into one perfect tool. For years, Jia champi oned its potential.
Tonight, he’d become the one who unleashed it.
Jia had hoped to do better. Ideally, he would have finished his assault before MSS counterintelligence units noticed the steady number of Chinese planes lifting out of Los Angeles under new orders, much less before they traced his signals into the labyrinth of Army bunkers. He’d intended to emerge from this room with the attack over and done with, allowing a superior officer to claim responsibility.
His orders never said who that man would be. He’d guessed it couldn’t be Shao Quan, but it wasn’t impossible that the governor, like Jia, also worked for the Sixth Department. Nearly every officer and politician had
