Edge of War rdr-2 Read online

  Edge of War

  ( Red Dragon Rising - 2 )

  Larry Bond

  Jim Defelice

  With CIA agent Mara Duncan helping him, Josh McArthur tries to escape the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, and the Chinese agents searching for him, but the war is widening. Other countries are standing with the Chinese "victims," but the US president has received word of Josh's information, and takes measures to slow the Chinese forces until he has the proof in his hands. The US finds itself facing off against Chinese forces at sea, while US officials argue about the cost of a new war to an already crippled economy. The American President knows Vietnam is only the beginning. If China is not stopped, the world will be consumed.

  Larry Bond, Jim DeFelice

  Edge of War

  The term “global warming” is as misleading as it is inaccurate. True, the overall temperature of the earth as measured by annual average readings will rise. But averages tell us next to nothing. A shortening of a rainy season by two weeks in a given area might be reflected by an increase in the average annual temperature of only a third of a degree. But the impact on the water supply — and thus the growing season — would be considerably higher.

  Paradoxically, rapid climate change may bring much lower temperatures in many places. It should also be noted that some changes may well benefit people in the affected areas, at least temporarily, by extending growing seasons, negating weather extremes, or having some other unpredictable effect.

  Unfortunately, the sensationalistic term, combined with the slow evolution of the effects prior to the crisis point, will make it hard to convince the general population of the true danger…

  — International Society of Environmental Scientists report

  Major Characters

  United States

  Josh MacArthur, scientist

  Mara Duncan, CIA officer

  Peter Lucas, CIA station chief, Bangkok/Southeast Asia

  Major Zeus Murphy, former Special Forces captain, adviser to Vietnam

  People’s Army

  Lieutenant Ric Kerfer, SEAL team platoon commander

  President George Chester Greene

  CIA Director Peter Frost

  National Security Adviser Walter Jackson

  China

  Lieutenant Jing Yo, commander, First Commando Detachment

  Colonel Sun Li, commando regiment commander, executive officer Task Force 1

  Premier Cho Lai

  Vietnam

  Premier Lein Thap

  General Minh Trung, head of the Vietnam People’s Army

  Other

  Jimmy Choi, Korean mercenary

  February 2014

  * * *

  “Peace Is What We Want” Chinese Premier Declares

  Beijing, china (World News Service) — Chinese Premier Cho Lai declared today that Chinese troops would leave Vietnam as soon as peace was assured there.

  “The dastardly attack on our border, killing dozens of innocent civilians, must be avenged,” declared Cho in an address to foreign ambassadors. “We will eliminate their capacity to conduct offensive war. When that is accomplished, Chinese troops will quickly withdraw to our borders.”

  The reception was generally favorable. Western analysts say…

  Heating Oil Shortage Continues in Maine

  Bangor, Maine (AP-Fox News) — Residents in the Bangor, Maine, area shivered through their third day of record cold temperatures as heating oil deliveries continued to be sparse.

  The shutdown of two major refineries due to environmental concerns is blamed for the latest shortage.

  Ironically, much of the rest of the Northeast is undergoing one of the warmest late winters on record. But that isn’t helping Maine residents, who…

  * * *

  Personal Chronicle: booking Back to 2014.

  Markus:

  When I wrote last I had taken the story up to late winter of 2014. Your uncle Josh had just found his way from behind the lines in Vietnam, returning to Hanoi with the help of the CIA and Navy SEALs. He thought he had escaped hell. The truth was, the worst part of his ordeal was just beginning.

  I know it’s hard for you to imagine what the world was like in 2014. It’s probably impossible for you to think that the world believed China was innocent of aggression, or that its leader, Cho Lai, wasn’t bent on taking over the world.

  How could we have ignored such an obvious threat?

  It’s hard to explain, even looking back. People were under tremendous strains. Many of the world’s economies had crashed. There was a great deal of turmoil. Right around the time this happened, there was an election in Italy that saw the Communist Party take control of the government! This was something that had not happened even right after World War II, — when many of the partisans had been Communists. It was an incredible, stunning development. It just showed how crazed people were. The last thing they wanted was trouble with China, let alone a war.

  Even America, which had been fortunate to escape the worst effects of the environmental changes, was struggling. China had become an important country financially — the U.S. owed it trillions of dollars. Many politicians were honestly reluctant to anger Premier Cho Lai, worried that he would order Chinese banks to start selling U.S. treasury notes and bonds wholesale. That would have sent interest rates soaring and destroyed our economy.

  But many politicians were simply blind. They refused to see the threat, even when it was staring them in the face. Only when their own lives were threatened did they wake up. By then it was too late…

  Run

  1

  Hanoi, Vietnam

  Josh slept through the bombing. He slept through the wail of the sirens. He slept through the rumble of the Plaza Hanoi across the street imploding. He slept through the strike at the new education ministry a half block away, and the collapse of the Vietnamese Private Commercial Enterprise Bank building a half mile away.

  Josh MacArthur slept and slept, oblivious to the sounds of the war he had suddenly found himself in, a war that he was not only witness to, but a critical part of. He missed the grating har-ush of the Chinese jets as they roared overhead, the last-minute shriek of the air-to-ground missiles just before they struck, and the steady rattle of the antiaircraft guns, twin-barreled 23 mm and the larger 57s and 85s, their shrapnel exploding in an irregular pattern.

  He missed the glass shattering everywhere, panes breaking like the thin ice over a pond on a late winter’s day. He missed the rumble of the gas lines as they blew up, muffled by the ground. He missed the sharp cracks of old wood splintering beneath the weight of collapsing roofs and walls.

  What woke him was the light touch of her footsteps in the hall, passing in front of his room on the way out.

  They belonged to the woman who’d rescued him, Mara Duncan. Against all odds, the CIA officer had found Josh behind the lines of the Chinese advance and pulled him with her through the jungle, across the hills to a rendezvous with American SEALs, who had brought him to a truck commandeered by two U.S. Army officers. Together, they barely managed to make it past the advancing Chinese troops, but managed nonetheless.

  The adventure would have been unimaginable for most people. But for Josh MacArthur, a weather scientist of all things, it seemed as unlikely as it could get. Josh had come to Vietnam to study the effects of the weather on the jungle. Instead, he had become a witness to man’s more immediate impact on the environment — the cold-blooded massacre of a Vietnamese village in the hills by the Chinese.

  The Chinese had also murdered his own colleagues. He’d missed that by chance, complete chance — his allergies had woken him and sent him away from the tents, out of concern for his colleagues and their sleep. His sneezing had save
d him.

  He’d run when the fighting began. Except that it wasn’t fighting; it was a massacre. The scientists and their support staff had been killed in their sleep, without any possibility of resistance.

  The killers had chased him as well. He’d run for his life, lost in the darkness in a country literally halfway around the world from his home.

  He’d been defenseless and alone, and yet running seemed like an act of cowardice, of weakness, as if he might somehow have made a difference.

  It was a foolish notion — the Chinese soldiers outnumbered him greatly, and in fact had barely missed him several times before his rescue. Josh had killed several himself, including one with his bare hands. There was no question, or should be no question, of his bravery.

  And yet that idea, that feeling of failure, woke with him in the gray light of the Hanoi hotel room.

  Josh sat upright in the bed. The hotel had never been one of the city’s best, nor a favorite with the international tourist crowd. The furnishings had been old and battered well before the war. There was only a pair of bare sheets on the bed. They hadn’t been changed in days, not since the war began. Josh had found them covered with dust and small bits of glass from the shattered windows, blown out from the attacks on the first night of the war. Too tired to talk to the staff — and guessing it would have been worthless to try — he’d pushed the small shards off on the floor and simply collapsed in bed a few hours before. Now he found grime stuck to him, held to his skin by his sweat.

  He put his hands on his chest, gently brushing downward, more to reassure himself that he was still there than to clear the clinging grit.

  As unglamorous as it was, the hotel was a solid, squat structure, dating from colonial times and overengineered by its French architect. Its sturdy walls had protected it from the shrapnel when the building across the street had collapsed, and while nothing was truly safe against a direct hit by one of the Chinese army’s larger weapons, the hotel was one of the safest buildings in the city still open to foreigners. And of course it was obvious that Josh and his friends were foreigners.

  He swung his legs out of bed. They were creaky and stiff. Josh had considered himself both athletic and in fairly good shape — he had taken letters in cross-country and baseball in high school, despite the asthma occasionally provoked by his allergies — but his ordeal in the jungle had tested his body. Both knees were sore, his right calf muscle had been pulled, and his neck felt as if it were a bolt twisted too tightly into its socket.

  Glancing at the gray twilight outside the window, he guessed it was roughly 5 a.m. His watch had been lost during the initial attack.

  He walked slowly to the door, mindful of the glass. There were small piles of it along the front of the room, which faced a side street away from the hotel that had imploded. Someone had come in and swept the larger pieces into the piles, but neglected to come back and remove them.

  Or maybe they had been killed before they got the chance. Several thousand civilians had died in Hanoi since the bombing began.

  Josh undid the lock and pulled open the door. A large man stood in front of him, blocking the door. It was Jenkins, aka Squeaky, one of the SEALs who had rescued him.

  “Hey, sir, where you going?” said Squeaky.

  His nickname was Squeaky because his voice occasionally cracked, jumping a few octaves. He sounded like a teenage boy on bad mornings as his voice begins to deepen. There was no precise pattern to the squeaks; they seemed to occur a little less under pressure, the opposite of what Josh would have expected.

  Squeaky was a big man, six ten and solidly built, stocky but not fat. He wore a pair of dungarees and a button-down shirt, in the Western style common in Vietnam’s urban areas. The clothes were all black; they seemed to merge with his black skin, making him look like a dark spirit haunting the building, a hungry ghost looking for its ancestral offerings, as the local folklore would have it. He had an MP-5 submachine gun, and held it down next to his body discreetly, almost as if he were hiding it.

  “I gotta use the john,” said Josh.

  “I’ll walk you down.”

  Josh fell in behind him. Squeaky rocked a little as he walked, shoulders nearly scraping the walls.

  “Hold on,” the SEAL told him when they reached the doorway to the restroom.

  He poked his head in, then reached back, took Josh’s arm, and tugged him in. For a second, Josh thought he was going to stay — a problem, since Josh liked privacy — but Jenkins was just making doubly sure the place was empty.

  “I’ll be outside. Stay away from that window, you know?”

  Josh nodded and stepped over to the commode. Fortunately, it was a Western-style toilet. But the water had been shut off sometime during the night, a fact Josh discovered when he tried to flush.

  Squeaky was waiting outside.

  “Water’s off,” Josh told him.

  “Yeah.”

  “I late to be the next guy that uses it.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  They started back for the room.

  “What time is it?” Josh asked as they walked.

  “Oh-four-ten,” said Squeaky, his voice cracking. “Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  Jenkins didn’t say anything. Josh wondered if he was self-conscious about his voice.

  “I heard someone walking in the hall before,” said Josh when they reached his room. He suddenly didn’t feel like going back inside. “Was it Mara?”

  “You heard that?”

  Josh shrugged. “What was up?”

  “Ms. Duncan had to go out.”

  “At four?”

  “I don’t set her schedule, bro.”

  “What about Mạ?”

  “The little girl?” Jenkins’s face noticeably brightened. “Sleepin’ like a peach. Cute little kid.”

  “Yeah,” said Josh.

  Josh had rescued the little girl after her parents and the rest of her village had been massacred by the invading Chinese. She was six or seven years old — Josh wasn’t sure.

  “We taking her with us?” Josh asked.

  “Decision’s above my pay grade.” Jenkins grinned. “Why don’t you go get yourself some sleep? Cap’ll be looking for you in a few hours. We got a long way to go. Rumor is no flights out of the airport.”

  “We flying out of here?”

  “We were supposed to.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t know how the hell we’re getting out of here,” Squeaky added. He smiled. “Swimmin’, maybe.”

  2

  Northern Vietnam

  Lieutenant Jing Yo knew better than to interrupt Colonel Sun Li when his commander was in the middle of a tirade. Neither patience nor understanding was among Sun’s strong points under the best of circumstances, and at times when he was angry, like now, saying anything would only deepen his rage.

  It was galling that Sun was bawling him out for failing to do the impossible. It was infuriating that the colonel’s decision to ignore Jing Yo’s advice had led to the very failure he was now complaining about. But making the slightest excuse would only lengthen the storm. The only solution was to weather it, as the young cherry tree weathers an unusually fierce winter, or the bamboo withstands the typhoon.

  The metaphors were not strictly poetic. Jing Yo had seen both, time and again, during his time at the monastery where he had studied Shaolin. He had passed one particularly brutal winter night in bare feet, seated across from one of his mentors in a mountain pass they called Claw. Ostensibly they were there to help any lost travelers caught out in the storm. The unstated reason, Jing Yo was sure, was to test his dedication as a follower of the one true way, a walker along the path that has no name and no presence, and yet endlessly exists, without beginning or end.

  That was what Shaolin was to him. The path of life. To others it was kung fu — the fighting way, the way of a monk warrior. Or an old, musty superstition.

  “You are expressly ordered to kill him. Do
you understand that?” thundered Sun. “Wherever you find him. Kill him. No matter the personal consequences to yourself.”

  Jing Yo tilted his head slightly. The colonel had jumped directly from his rant to the order. Jing Yo felt as if he had missed something.

  “Colonel, if our spies say he has reached Hanoi,” said Jing Yo softly, “how do you want me to proceed?”

  “You call yourself a commando?” thundered Sun. “I have to outline everything for you?”

  Jing Yo pressed his lips together. In truth, Sun was no more irrational than the monks had seemed when Jing Yo first came to the monastery. But in their case, the seeming illogic masked a much deeper sense and purpose. Sun’s was chaos for chaos’s sake — emotion, as those drunk on the surface of reality would perceive it.

  “Our agents believe he is in the city already. You will be given instructions on how to contact them,” said Sun. “And a briefing from intelligence. My advice to you is to leave as soon as you can. It will be more difficult to get into the city after dawn. Take whatever men you need. Here is a phone. Use it wisely.”

  Jing Yo took the satellite phone from Sun. It was a precious commodity. Even the army could not be trusted in the political upheaval roiling China.

  “Do not fail,” said Sun. He folded his arms. “You have tried my patience already.”

  3

  The outskirts of Hanoi

  Mara Duncan slumped in the backseat of the car, trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible, even though it was the sedan, not her, that would attract attention. It was the only vehicle on the road that wasn’t connected with the military.

  Even before the war, Hanoi was generally deserted at four in the morning. Now it was like something out of a Dantean painting, the fires of hell burning around the city. The moonless night was tinged red by the flames, their glow occasionally clouded by black smoke furrowing from their center. The smoke threw vaporous shadows into the air, darkening the city beyond what seemed physically possible. It was as if Hanoi were at the epicenter of a black hole, its matter being pushed together into a mass that defied reason but was nonetheless mathematically correct. And Mara Duncan was a witness to it all.