Shadows of War - [Red Dragon Rising 01] Read online

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  Shadows of War

  [Red Dragon Rising 01]

  Larry Bond & Jim DeFelice

  No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  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

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  Fresh Riots Suppressed in Northwest China

  WULUMUQI, NORTHWESTERN CHINA (World News Service)—Unofficial sources reported today that government forces had suppressed a riot near the town center, the third report of a disturbance in northwestern China over the past week.

  While food riots have subsided with the selection of China’s new premier, Premier Cho Lai, Western analysts say Cho Lai faces a difficult task as China confronts devastating food shortages brought on by a third consecutive year of record drought. With food and other commodity prices soaring and the country already battered by the worldwide depression, an estimated forty percent of the Chinese male working-age population is out of work.

  In Chinese-occupied Tibet, six persons were shot to death by soldiers during. . .

  Housing Prices Hit New Record Low in U.S.

  WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP-Fox News)—The FDIC today released a report showing that house prices in the U.S. had reached their lowest point in fifty years, when adjusted for inflation.

  Analysts caution, however, that the statistics are somewhat misleading, as rampant inflation in the food sector over the past two years has skewed inflation numbers skyward. The unprecedented rate of inflation is due to decreased crop yields throughout much of the world, and the consequent pressure on American farm prices.

  “If we were in a period of normal inflation, say only three or four percent,” said John Torano, analyst for the HSBC-Key-Banco, the world’s largest bank, “then the decline in house prices would be only about twice what we saw in early 2009.”

  Still, Torano and others admit that the downward pressure on housing prices will put more families in jeopardy. The bankruptcy reform laws passed last year failed to lower the number of filings . . .

  Brighton Beach Renaissance Continues

  LONDON (Reuters-Gannet News Service)—Sally Smith frowned as she pulled into the parking lot B of the new Brighton Motor Park. The sign at the entrance flashed “FULL,” even though it was only half past eight.

  “Balls,” said Smith in frustration as her two little girls complained sleepily in the rear seat that they wanted to get swimming. “It’s getting so you have to come an hour before dawn to get a parking spot.”

  Smith’s problem is cause for celebration among the owners of hotels and tourist spots in this seashore town, which until two years ago was a boarded-up ghost, fifty years past its glory.

  Now, thanks to a climate shift that has raised the average year-round temperature in southern England to a balmy seventy-eight degrees, Brighton is booming. In March, where once the average high temperature was a damp 8.3 Celsius, or 47 degrees Fahrenheit, sunbathers must be careful in the afternoons to avoid sunstroke. Last week, the temperature peaked at 32 Celsius, or 89 Fahrenheit—which would have been a near-record for August just two years back.

  Scientists say the warm-up is due to a number of factors besides the general trend of global warming. In Brighton’s case, the combination ...

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  Personal Chronicle: booking Back to 2014.

  To my beloved grandson Markus:

  Here is the continuation of our family chronicle I promised, picking up in the winter of 2014. It seems like only yesterday that this all took place—and yet the time before it seems buried further in the past than ancient Rome. So much has changed, and nearly all of it caused by the conflicts that erupted that year.

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  In the year 2014, the violent changes in the weather and climate began to take their toll on the world in ways that many had feared, but few had spoken of. Violence increased everywhere—in the cities, in the suburbs, even in farm country, where our family lived. But it was the violence between nations that came to dominate our thoughts and nightmares that year.

  Our family had been one of the lucky ones. Like most of our neighbors, we had benefited greatly from the rising crop prices. Our corn was worth twice what it had been less than five years before, and the yields, due to the latest genetic advances, were practically three times as high per acre. Best of all, there were ready markets for anything we could grow.

  Prices for nearly everything were shooting up fast, but we were still far ahead of the game, especially when compared to the people on the East and West Coasts. My parents had cut back quite a bit, but mostly on things that as a kid you hardly notice—eating out, new clothes, extras. For us, the fact that we couldn’t go see friends after school was probably the biggest impact. They cut back on the gas they used, though our four-year-old hybrid got what was considered decent mileage then. The real savings came with the fuel cell engines that had only just come out; we couldn’t afford one yet.

  We saw on television and read on the Internet about what was going on in Europe and Asia. There were riots in Europe, but Asia seemed to be hit even harder. I remember downloading pictures for a class project that showed more than a hundred bodies floating in a narrow stream—or what looked like a narrow stream, since according to the caption it was really a road. The picture had been taken in China, of a flash flood in a village in a northwestern province. If I remember correctly it was particularly ironic, because the area hadn’t seen rain in several months. Then suddenly in two days there was a deluge, twenty-some inches inside forty-four hours.

  What I didn’t know then, being only ten, was that China was in much worse shape than those pictures revealed. Their rice-growing regions in the north and east—for centuries the mainstay of the population—had been racked by devastating typhoons. The overcrowded population in the smog-filled cities near the coast was suffering tremendously. Unemployment was nearing 50 percent, a sharp contrast to just four or five years before, when China’s rapid industrialization had transformed the old Communist society into one of the most productive on earth. Every day there were food riots, though news of them got out only by chance. The Chinese were in free fall.

  I doubt I would have understood all of that then, even if I’d known it. A ten-year-old’s world has very strict boundaries, and mine were at the edge of our farm. So when my older cousin Joshua—the man we call your uncle Josh—told the family he was leaving for Vietnam, it was as if he were going to outer space. In fact, I probably knew more about outer space and some of the planets there than I did about Vietnam, or even its neighbor China. But what happened in China and Southeast Asia, to Josh and to the people there, would affect our family greatly in the end, and the whole world. Ignorance, it turned out, was anything but bliss. . . .

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  1

  Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China

  The sneeze rushed him out of the dream, squeezing away the black shadows he’d been running through. It didn’t quite wake Josh MacArthur up, however—the second sneeze did that, shaking his body so violently that he knocked over the small radio near his sleeping bag. He rolled over and slipped to the edge of the mattress before the third sneeze, trying to bury his face in his arm to muffle the noise. This was only partly successful, and Josh, worried that he would wake the rest of the team, grabbed the cover of his sleeping bag and stifled the next sneeze, and the next.

  When he was finally able to take a good breath without sneezing, Josh rose to his knees and crawled to the side of the tent, looking for the small plastic box with his antihistamines. After a bit of patting around he found it, but it was too dark inside the tent to sort through the pills— he carried two types, of similar sizes but different strengths. He wanted the one more powerful at nighttime, not caring that it would make him drowsy.

  His flashlight had rolled away somewhere when he knocked over the radio, and he couldn’t see it. Finally he decided to go outside and walk to the clearing, where the moonlight might be strong enough for him to tell the difference between the blue and green pills; it would also give him a chance to relieve himself. He grabbed his jeans from the edge of the cot and pulled them on. Remembering the snakes he’d seen during the day, he shook out his boots before putting them on, then took his sweatshirt from the base of his camp bed and went outside.

  The moist mountain air provoked another sneeze.

  Josh cursed his sinuses silently and walked over to the open area where they’d made a fire the previous evening. It was reduced to dead ashes now, but there was enough open space for the moon to shine full; he could see not only his hands but the cuts across his palm. He opened the pillbox and sorted through its contents, worried he would sneeze again and spill them in the dirt, where they might be lost forever. Finally he found one he was convinced was green—one of the strong ones—and popped it into his mouth.

  He swallowed, grimacing at the bitter taste the pill left in his throat. Then he moved toward the bushes and trees a few yards away to find a place to pee.

  Northwestern Vietnam was not the best place for a man with allergies, but MacArthur hadn’t considered his body’s foibles when he decided on his career as a weather scientist, nor had he thought about it much when he chose his doctoral thesis topic, the impact of rapid climate change on Asian mammals. Vietnam was not only a good place to study his subject; there was actually money available to fund the research, since few scientists wanted to go to such a distant place when there were ample topics in the developed world. These days, one could study the effects of climate change and still sleep in a hotel bed at night.

  But Vietnam, snakes and all, offered other consolations. The mountains and valleys of the north were breathtakingly spectacular. And while they had been greatly affected by the rapid changes in the world’s weather that had occurred over the last five years, the changes were much more benign, and even beneficial, than those elsewhere.

  One of the changes meant it was slightly wetter and warmer in February than it ordinarily would have been just five years before. But warmth was relative—MacArthur pulled on his sweatshirt and rubbed his hands together, trying to ward off the chill as he looked for a suitable place to relieve himself.

  The young scientist had just found a large rock when he heard something pushing through the scrub to his right. He froze with fear.

  A tiger!

  Ordinarily they didn’t range quite this far west, but they too had suffered the consequences of climate change, and were expanding their range.

  What was he supposed to do? Crouch? Freeze? Run? What had he been told during orientation?

  Before his mind could supply an answer, he heard another sound, this one farther away There were two, no three animals moving through the brush.

  A fourth.

  They couldn’t be tigers. The cats didn’t hunt in packs.

  But this realization didn’t comfort him. Something was definitely there, moving through the vegetation toward the camp.

  Thieves?

  Someone shouted. MacArthur spoke very rudimentary Vietnamese, and what he heard didn’t match with the words he knew.

  There was another shout, and then a very loud and strange popping noise, a bang that seemed unworldly. The whole mountain shuddered, then flashed oddly white.

  Then came a noise he did recognize, one he’d heard long ago as a child, a sound that had filled his nightmares ever since—an automatic weapon began rattling behind him, its sound the steady, quick stutter of death. Another joined in, then another and another.

  Without thinking, without even looking where he was going, Josh MacArthur took off running in the opposite direction, dodging through the thick brush in the moonlight.

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  2

  Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China

  Lieutenant Jing Yo stiffened as Colonel Sun Li strode up the hill.

  “What happened here, Lieutenant?” said the colonel.

  “The intelligence was not good. There were Vietnamese soldiers in the camp. The regular troops panicked and began to fire. We came up from the road as soon as we heard the gunfire. By then, of course, it was too late.”

  “They killed them?”

  “Yes,” said Jing Yo. “As best I can determine, there were only two Vietnamese soldiers in the camp. The rest were unarmed. It appeared to be a scientific expedition.”

  “Science?”

  “There are different instruments. It was a UN team.”

  Sun frowned. Killing Vietnamese was one thing; murdering international scientists, quite another.

  “An expedition?” The colonel’s expression changed as he considered this. “So they were spies.”

  Jing Yo shook his head. “Their equipment—”

  “They were spies, Lieutenant. If the matter should ever be raised later on. Something that is very unlikely. In the meantime, we still have operational secrecy. That was maintained, for better or worse.”

  Jing Yo knew better than to disagree. Colonel Sun was Jing Yo’s superior as head of the commando regiment. More important as far as the present operation was concerned, he was the executive officer to General Ho Ling, the commander of Group Task Force 1, and thus the second-in-command of the army at the spearhead of the campaign to subdue Vietnam. Though still in his early thirties, Sun was as politically connected as any general in the army, as his position with the commandos demonstrated: he was the nephew of Premier Cho Lai—the favorite nephew, by all accounts.

  Still, Jing Yo was not a toady or yes-man; Sun would not have had him as a platoon leader and personal confidant if he was.

  “I sense from your silence that you disapprove,” said Sun when Jing Yo didn’t answer. “You consider this attack a sign of poor discipline.”

  “It does not signify achievement.”

  Sun laughed. “Well said, my understated monk.” The colonel practically bellowed. “Well said. But what do we expect of these ignorant peasants? We’ve worn out our tongues on this.”

  Sun had, in fact, argued against using regular troops rather than commandos for the secret border mission before the invasion. But General Ho had countered that the tasks could be conducted by regular troops with some guidance. The argument became moot when the central command decided to allocate only one commando platoon—Jing Yo’s—to the mission. They blamed this on manpower shortages, but in truth the decision had much more to do with army politics: central command wanted to limit the commandos’ influence by limiting their glories.

  “We’ll have to wipe these idiots’ noses for them before it’s through,” said Sun. “But Vietnam is not Malaysia, eh? We won’t be fighting the CIA here.”

  “No,” said Jing Yo. “But we should not underestimate our enemy.”

  One of the regular
soldiers rushed up from the side of the hill. It was Sergeant Cho, one of the noncommissioned officers who had presided over the massacre.

  “Colonel, Private Bai believes he heard someone running up the hill in that direction,” said Cho.

  “Lieutenant, investigate,” said Sun. “We do not need witnesses.”

  Jing Yo bowed his head, then turned to Cho. “Which way?”

  “I will show you.”

  “No, you will tell me. My men and I will deal with it.”

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  3

  Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China