Shadows of War

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 body — ”

“Leave it. I need you here.”

“We will come immediately.”

4

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 reason — the 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 there — within a day’s drive, maybe two or three if they’re conserving fuel and get confused on the directions — a mechanized division. And then up here, three to four days — two 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 2008–2009, 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