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 say — what 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.”
5
Josh rolled over. He tried pulling the blankets closer, but they were wrapped so tightly that he couldn’t move. Sweat poured from his body, so thick that he began to choke.
He twisted over again, grabbing for his pillow. He remembered the dream, the nightmare memory of the homicide that had changed his life irreparably.
He was choking to death, drowning.
With a sudden burst of energy, Josh jerked upright, pulling himself back to full consciousness. He rose, stepping out of the bushes where he’d dragged himself, exhausted, a few hours before.
His mind emptied of all thought, all emotion and sensation. Josh didn’t, couldn’t, think. He couldn’t even feel the presence of his toes or legs or arms. He simply floated in a void, a vacuum within a vacuum.
And then he felt his legs stinging.
His toes were wet and cold. His ankles felt heavy with fluid. He’d wrenched his right knee, and it throbbed. His right thigh felt like it had been punched by one of the trees he’d run into. His sides burned, as if physically on fire. His right lower rib ached, the pain growing, then easing, with each breath. The muscles at the side of his lower chest — the external oblique anterolateral abdominal muscles, a name he knew because he’d torn them in high school playing lacrosse — sent sharp bolts of pain shrieking across the ribs. His right arm felt numb, his shoulder senseless, his fingers cramped stiff. His neck was wrenched to one side. His jaw had locked closed, his back molars grinding against each other.
It was light, either just before or just after dawn. The clouds and thick jungle to the east obscured the sun, making it hard to tell.
Josh pushed himself backward, trying to raise himself into a seated position. His hands slipped into mud and he fell backward, dropping into the water behind him. Caught entirely by surprise — he hadn’t thought he was anywhere this close to the creek — he fell below the surface. He rolled and pushed himself up, gulping the air.
He rose, then stepped to a small apron of smooth stones at the edge of the stream. The water was calm here, the current very gentle. He looked behind him and saw that the stream had flooded a wide area, a nook between two low hills on the ridge. The area didn’t look familiar, which
Rubbing his thighs with his hands, Josh looked around, belatedly searching the area for his pursuers. Who were they?
Thieves was the only possible answer, and yet it seemed impossible that anyone would want to rob a scientific expedition. Foolhardy, too — the Vietnamese government had endorsed the project, and even sent two soldiers along with the guides.
Thieves were a rarity in Vietnam, and this wasn’t supposed to be a dangerous area: Dr. Renaldo had said the soldiers were along not as protection, but so the Vietnamese could justify the fee they took from the UN’s grant for administration. “The price of doing business,” said the scientist philosophically before they left Hanoi.
So if it was so safe, who had come and killed most of his expedition?
The Vietnamese themselves? It made no sense.
But then, who would kill an Iowa farm family in a murder apparently patterned after the
Looking for logic from human beings was illogical and often futile. Josh knew that by heart.
There was a knot in his stomach. He was hungry. He tried to remember what Kerry, the flora specialist, had told him about some of the plants. He’d been far more interested in the curve of her hips and the way her small breasts poked at the light muslin shirt than in the nutritional value of the local grasses and brush.
The nearby bushes were thick with green and pink berries. Josh reached for a bunch of the pink ones, then stopped. They might be poison, or simply unripe.
He could wait, he decided. He wasn’t that hungry.
Josh began walking along the bank of the flooded stream, following the ripples in the water as it moved downstream.
Was it the right direction? He reasoned that as long as he moved downhill, he would be heading toward people, but whether that was really a good thing or not he couldn’t say. The Vietnamese tended to be generous toward strangers, but what if the stream brought him to the people who had killed his friends?
Moving was better than sitting.
He was bruised terribly, and his knee hurt, but none of his bones seemed to be broken.
After an hour or so, the sun battered its way through the clouds and the air turned sweet. After another hour, his aches and bruises melted. Except for the insects and the shape of the trees and bushes, he could have been back at school, taking a summer’s hike in the woods.
Josh figured he’d been walking for nearly three hours when he spotted a small bridge made of bamboo and tree trunks spanning the creek. The bamboo on the bridge was bright yellow, relatively new — maybe in place for only a week or two. One of the posts was new as well, a rough-hewn tree trunk stuck into the ground at a slight angle, brown rather than gray like the others.
The bridge connected to a narrow path on both sides of the stream. The jungle was thick on the left, but light filtered through the trees on the right; there was a field beyond.
Josh climbed up the incline to the path, trying to muster his small store of Vietnamese words:
