“Well, thanks for the time. Here’s my card if you ever find anything you can share.” He handed Wrangell his business card and let himself out. Wrangell opened the file and began to read. He was surprised at the amount of information the East L.A. police had accumulated on Monzani. He had numerous arrests but no convictions. His gang was believed to exceed five thousand members. He had established a well-defined territory for drug distribution, believed to have several methamphetamine laboratories in operation, ran two chop shops and a stolen car ring, and kept street crime at modest levels in his district. His territory encompassed about four square miles of East L.A. The report stated that Monzani thought it was bad for business to have heists relieving his clientele of their money. He had several mistresses at various times and owned the restaurant where he worked as manager. Several lieutenants had been identified and had dossiers of their own. One of them was named Gomez, who disappeared from sight months ago. It struck him that many of the trucks and vans used by Gonzalez had been purchased by his gang members, the Caballeros.
The meeting was called by Monzani’s lieutenants. It was a strategy meeting to consider a successor to Gomez and what actions to take regarding Monzani’s murder. Signs of encroachment by rival gangs into the Caballeros’ territory were beginning to appear. Gomez’s presence was something of a surprise, but no one objected. Gomez leaned his chair against the wall along the side while the lieutenants expressed various opinions as to who had killed Monzani and why. After all had spoken, Gomez rose and quietly said, “You’re all wrong. He was killed by a Chinaman. I don’t know all of the connections of the Chinaman, but it was this Chinaman who set up Jesus Gonzalez in Mexico, had him raiding into the States, and supplied him with guns and supplies. When the Army knocked over Gonzalez’s camp in Mexico, they caught Gonzalez. Gonzalez spilled his guts to the feds. The feds were closing in on the Chinaman. Miguel was a go-between for the Chinaman and Gonzalez. All those vehicles the gang bought went to Gonzalez. The Chinaman wanted to close the loop by eliminating Miguel. I don’t know why the Chinaman wanted to cause all this trouble. Maybe the Chinaman had ideas about what was going on overseas. Maybe he worked for a foreign government; it seems so. I think Miguel said something wrong to the Chinaman. Maybe he threatened to expose him. I think that is why he died.”
“And who is this Chinaman of whom you speak? Where do we find him to ask him?”
“I don’t know. I saw him several times in Gonzalez’s camp. That’s why Miguel sent me there, to figure out what was going on. This Chinaman that killed the Russian in the whorehouse was one of the Chinaman’s people. I recognized his picture. He was always with the Chinaman. The Chinaman left another babysitter with Gonzalez in Mexico. I don’t know what happened to him. I came back just before the Army raided the camp. I saw the raid coming and told Miguel so. Miguel obviously did not tell the Chinaman, or if he did, the Chinaman did not tell Gonzalez, or Gonzalez chose to ignore it. I don’t know which. We should find this Chinaman and ask him, as you suggest.” With that, Gomez sat down.
“There was a Japanese who came into the restaurant and talked with Miguel and ate in the back room. I think his name was Ito, though. We followed him to the COSCO shipping company offices one day. We can point him out to you any day you wish to go, Gomez. If he is the Chinaman of whom you speak, we can ask him.”
“Then, I will go with you early tomorrow. I will meet with you here at five o’clock in the morning and observe where he works. I don’t want to be late and miss him. You will meet me here, and we will go?”
“Yes, I, Bernardo, will meet you here and we will go with binoculars tomorrow. In the meantime, we should all consider who we should elect to replace Miguel.”
As they sat sipping coffee in an old Dodge pickup the next morning, Bernardo said, “There is his car” as it pulled into the reserved parking space. Gomez picked up the binoculars and watched Chan as he entered his office.
“It’s him. He is the one who came to the camp in Mexico and supplied all the guns. He is no peon. He is someone who is important.”
“We know where he lives. Now he has no bodyguards. They used to pick him up and bring him to work and then home again. We will have a talk with him, perhaps tonight before he can hire reinforcements.”
The locksmith who unlocked the door of Chan’s apartment early the next morning was indeed a registered locksmith. He did not drive his company truck with the signs painted all over it, but a fellow gang member took him to Chan’s apartment building and gave him the number of the apartment. It only took him a few moments to unlock Chan’s door, and then he left. Ten minutes later, Bernardo entered first, followed every five minutes by another until there were six armed gang members in Chan’s apartment. They searched every aspect of it. They found nothing incriminating, so they waited for Chan’s return. A gang member reported to Bernardo by cell phone when Chan left work. Another reported when Chan parked his car in the apartment building’s lot.
Chan walked into the trap in complete surprise. He was intravenously injected with a dose of heroin so that he could be easily controlled. A minute later, he vomited on the floor. Two of the gang members left to drive their van to the rear door of the apartment. Chan was more or less carried by two gang members to the waiting van. Chan was driven to a secure house in East L.A. where he was handcuffed, gagged, and left on the floor in a closet for eight hours.
After the heroin wore off, the questioning began. At first, Chan declared he was only a shipping clerk. After the second heated needle was shoved under a fingernail, he began to talk. When he balked, a toenail was ripped off. His bowels autonomically released the contents from the pain. Chan talked some more. A tape recording was made of the session. Chan admitted that he supplied the arms to Gonzalez as a conspiracy to incite civil unrest in the southwest. He personally hoped to profit by the sale of many weapons and security services to the Anglo community of the southwest. Bernardo didn’t buy it. They pulled a molar tooth with a pair of pliers. Chan talked some more. It wasn’t enough. He denied any knowledge of the death of Miguel Monzani. Bernardo took one of Chan’s testicles in the jaws of a pair of slip-joint pliers. Chan screamed as Bernardo slowly squeezed. Chan began dry heaving. He said he didn’t know who killed Miguel, but that someone in his organization, COSCO, did out of fear that Monzani would talk. Further pressure on the pliers induced Chan to admit that he was a Chinese government agent. The involvement with Gonzalez and the raids were to tie down forces of the American Army along the Mexican border while North Korea invaded the south.
After a brief consultation, Bernardo and his men decided that the best course of action was to give Chan and the tape of his confession to the FBI. They bound and gagged him, wiped their prints off everything, placed the tape in a plastic bag, and took Chan to a deserted house in the barrio where they abandoned him. From a phone booth, Bernardo wiped his prints off a quarter and dropped it into the phone and dialed the FBI number. He played a tape recording for the FBI operator. “Turn on your tape recorders. I will only say this once.” After a minute’s pause, Bernardo played the tape that he earlier recorded through a voice scrambler. “At 3342 Margarita Avenue in East L.A., you will find a Chinese spy and a tape recorded confession by him describing his and the Chinese government’s involvement in the raids from Mexico. I suggest you quickly find him before he dies.” He turned off the recorder and hung up the phone after wiping it clean with an oiled cloth.
Chapter 35
The FBI requested the RCMP to investigate any travels Robert Wha Lee, aka Robert Zin Wang, had made in Canada in the last five years. A computer search revealed that one Robert Zin Wang had flown from Toronto to Japan fifteen months earlier. From there, he was traced to Taipei by taking a flight on Japan Airlines. The dates corresponded with a fishing vacation Robert Wha Lee had taken. He had not reported this trip overseas. Indeed, during that vacation, he reported that he was fishing in an isolated location in New Brunswick for Atlantic salmon and that he was not even taking his cell phone. American agents in Taipei were informed to check for any records, hotel, travel excursions, flights, or anything else they could find for Robert Zin Wang. Enlisting the cooperation of the Taiwanese authorities, they meticulously checked the computerized hotel records for the dates involved. It was discovered that he checked into the Taipei Hilton for a period of three days before returning to Japan on a JAL flight. Any other movements or activities on Taiwan were unknown. When the FBI received this information, a special detail was formed to monitor every movement of Robert Wha Lee.
During this excursion to Taipei, Robert Wha Lee had actually stayed in his hotel room the entire time. During that three-day period, Robert Wha Lee extensively briefed his superiors on the presidential candidate he had been guarding for the previous six months, the now President Jason Thornton. His superiors wanted critical insight into how Jason Thornton thought and acted and likely to react. They wanted into Jason Thornton’s mind. Lee’s assessment of Jason Thornton had been very accurate, to a point.
The political commissars of the People’s Republic of China did not really expect Jason Thornton to win the election. They, therefore, considered it worth the risk to bring Robert Wha Lee to Taiwan for debriefing rather than debriefing him in the United States or Canada that might expose other agents. They underestimated the depth of the culture war waging in the United States, the war between the social welfare liberal left wing of the Democratic Party and the coalition forming between the Midwestern and western states. More and more blue collar Democrats were deserting the Democratic Party to the Libertarian or Republican parties. The Libertarian party almost cost Jason Thornton the election when it captured fifteen percent of the vote. It became a growing force, and the Republican Party realized it would have to woo or co-opt some of their issues.
Under pressure from the United States, Canada initiated an individual identification program for all people arriving or leaving on international flights. When the travelers stepped through the door framed metal detector, their digital photograph was automatically recorded. The door frame of the metal detector was numbered in meters on the left and feet on the right so that their height was measured in the photograph. Travelers then placed their right hand on a glass screen and looked into an apparatus similar to that used by ophthalmologists for eye examinations for three seconds. Their photograph, retinal scans and fingerprints were simultaneously and automatically digitally recorded and filed into a bank of IBM super computers funded by the United States from secret funds under the War on Terrorism program. Since it didn’t cost the Canadian government any initial start-up costs, and the United States agreed to pay for the first three years of the program, Canada willingly went along with it. Each traveler’s personal identification along with flights traveled were automatically recorded and filed along with personal data each time they traveled. Any discrepancies between previous name, address, photographs, fingerprints or retinal scans were immediately identified by the computers for investigation. Robert Wha Lee was among the very first to fly under the program. Since it caught him by surprise, Robert Wha Lee was forced to travel in Canada under the false identity of Robert Zin Wang on all future trips. The results of the program were astounding. In the first two years, more than three dozen significant discrepancies were found that identified foreign agents and would-be terrorists. Some of them were wanted in more than one country for terrorist activities. Most of them wound up in prison or extradited. A few foreigners against whom no charges could be filed were sent under guard to their native land under threat of prison should they return.
The President was informed of Robert Wha Lee’s double identity. Lee was given two weeks convalescent leave after examination at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The neurologist attending Robert Wha Lee expressed the opinion that Lee might have suffered a minor case of contrecoup. He informed the FBI agents that contrecoup is a bruising of the brain on the opposite side of the impact because the cerebral spinal fluid cannot rebound sufficiently fast enough to cushion the brain when it rebounds into the skull opposite the point of impact. Many individuals who have suffered serious head trauma have experienced slow mental deterioration, often to the point of idiocy or death. Thornton made the decision to have him assigned to other duties under the excuse that his injuries might have subtle but serious latent effects.
Fred Gateway, the Secretary of the Treasury and Ed McCluskey put their heads together. All were aware of a very good counterfeiting ring operating out of Taiwan. Their reproduction of U.S. Federal Reserve Notes in denominations of twenty and fifty dollar bills, including the bar chip, was extremely good. It was decided that if Lee were to be re-assigned to counterfeiting, it would only be a question of time until his Chinese superiors perceived this as an opportunity; certainly not as great as being the President’s personal bodyguard, but an opportunity nevertheless. In this position, the Treasury Department could use him without his knowledge as a double agent. They could feed him partially factual information which he, in turn, would provide to his Chinese handler. It might be an opportunity to close down the counterfeit ring that was dumping several hundred million counterfeit U.S. dollars into the world markets each year. Lee’s Treasury Department superiors assigned him to the counterfeiting division, explaining to him that they couldn’t take a chance on a presidential bodyguard having a blackout at a crucial time. Lee accepted the assignment with resignation.
Lee began to take walks around the neighborhood, jogging around the local high school track when it wasn’t in use, and moderate exercise on his home gym. While jogging one day, he made a phone call from a public phone booth one week after being re-assigned. The phone call was videotaped by an FBI agent sitting in a car two hundred yards away. Robert Wha Lee’s body blocked the numbers punched into the phone. The video tape was examined, the time the call was made, the number and location of the phone all revealed sufficient evidence as to who was called. Checking with the telephone company revealed the call went to a Chinese restaurant that functioned as an establishment frequented by Chinese Embassy personnel.
Four FBI agents who were unknown to Lee were flown in from a Midwestern city and assigned to his case. They began to individually frequent the restaurant under various guises. One late afternoon, Lee was observed to abandon a newspaper on a park bench during a walk. A few minutes later, an elderly Chinese lady sat on the same bench, picked up the newspaper and began to read. After a few minutes, she folded the newspaper under her arm and left. She was photographed from four hundred yards away. She was identified as a matron associated with the Chinese restaurant that evening. Searching through their garbage cans late that night did not reveal the newspaper. A court order was granted, and the phone lines to the restaurant were tapped. A nearby apartment was rented by a black American couple, who just happened to be FBI agents. He posed as a stevedore and she as a sales clerk in a department store. They began to frequent the restaurant for evening meals once or twice a week. The owners of the restaurant were placed under twenty-four hour surveillance.
General Lui, Lien-chang was concerned, but not overly so, regarding the losses he had sustained. According to his staff’s best estimates, they amounted to between 60 and 65% of his troops. He anticipated the Vietnamese would offer the stiffest resistance, and he was right. It was stiffer than he expected. Still, his armies had done as anticipated. The Malayan peninsula was essentially depopulated. Near as his staff could calculate, there were less than 10% of the people left in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand who lived there eighteen months ago. There were still small bands of survivors hiding out in caves, in the hills, in the jungles, but over time, these small groups would be eliminated. Most of these bands were in the hill country, where their survival without the support of the general population would be most difficult. He would assign the remnants of his armies to protect the incoming settlers. General Chang was pleased with his progress, and General Lui was always satisfied when he pleased his superiors. He decided that this was the time to request the settlers during his weekly radio report to General Chang.
The People’s Republic of China was offering massive incentives to entire villages in the southern and southwestern provinces willing to move into the Malayan peninsula. They were promised modern farm machinery, new homes, wells dug to provide potable water, sewage systems with small but modern treatment plants, livestock, schools and medical clinics. They would be moved into the rich lowlands of Southeast Asia, where they could produce two, or perhaps even three, major rice crops a year. Villages of the higher elevations would be provided with what the Chinese government hoped would be the next generation of genetically engineered wheat as well as proven strains of rice and maize where feasible. Food security was paramount to the People’s Republic of China. Since the 1990s, the Chinese agronomists had been experimenting with genetically engineered plants under uncontrolled conditions. The heads of the cereal grains had dramatically improved, but the stems were another matter. The heads were too heavy to be supported by the stems, and so with most of the newer strains of rice and wheat, the stalks gave way and bent over to the point that harvesting without damage was a serious problem.
Hundreds of small villages, living on the fringe of the twentieth century, gladly accepted the offer. Their land plots were small; in drought years they could only feed themselves. Their young people were being siphoned off into the cities of the eastern seaboard by the promise of modernity with the illusion of finding a better life than was offered by their parents.
Construction crews were detailed to construct new villages during the dry season. Military civil engineers were put in charge of districts. Land was surveyed. Tentative districts had been drawn on maps two years earlier. Civilian civil engineers were assigned one village at a time so that they would concentrate all of their efforts and energies on that single village. Their skills and progress in construction were graded according to design and quality. The civil engineers had overall responsibility, and the foremen of the crews of the carpenters, masons, electricians and plumbers were responsible to the engineer. An agronomist was assigned either to each village or district, according to the perceived necessity, productivity, terrain and experience of the agronomist. The terrain, climate, soil, potential agricultural productivity, and human necessities were thus all included and designed at the local level. Centralized planning with decentralized execution was the strategy. The typical village design was for fifty to one hundred families per village. Irrigation ditches and pumps were constructed. Concrete block homes with running water, indoor plumbing and electricity were raised with surprising rapidity. Each home consisted of a kitchen, a modest living room, bathroom, and two bedrooms. Each house was provided with a television, a radio, a computer, a fuel oil stove and a telephone. For many of the poorer villages, it would be a step up into paradise.
General Lui made the call. It went out on the microwave length, as on a cell phone. The Big Ear satellite had monitored all the weekly reports from the army fronts. The Chinese knew it but didn’t care. What would the United States or Europe do about it anyway? If it was seriously detrimental information, it would be sent encrypted or by air courier. The Little Eye satellite recorded how the Chinese follow-on battalions quickly bulldozed graves about three feet deep for massive burial for the entire population of villages. Surgeon General Carolyn Weber expressed the possibility that the shallow graves would ultimately allow faster decomposition of the bodies resulting in more fertile soil, and allow the bones to be more easily recovered when they could be ground for fertilizer. Individuals murdered singly or in twos or threes were generally not buried but left for scavengers or to rot where they fell. Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent had several species of jackals, foxes, wolves, leopards, and vultures. She likened it to the slaughter of the bison on the American prairies.
“Yes, General Chang, we are ready for the engineers and their construction crews. We are doing most satisfactorily. I hope they can get started and completed before the monsoons come, which would make such efforts doubly hard and less than perfect. It would also allow the settlers to move in and immediately start their rice sets. The few remaining natives should prove no real difficulty, a minor nuisance at best. My staff is already designing defensive forces from my units to be detailed to each of the villages. It would most certainly help when the engineers and their staffs arrive so we can further fine tune these defensive units according the size of the village and the anticipated threat, if any. I am concerned about them getting started before the so-called ‘dust rain’ begins in the northern half of our new province of Vietnam. This persistent drizzle will begin two months from now, in February. The southern half of Vietnam is just starting its drier period which will last from this month of December into April. Perhaps it would be better to concentrate on the southern portion as a result of the climate. The engineers would have more time to complete their projects. The downside is the land line of communication that might be occasionally temporarily interrupted. As we earlier discussed, if things are brought by the sea, then they are much less likely to be interrupted by the few remnants of the Vietnamese Army who will probably attempt to wage guerilla war. It would certainly be cheaper to ship building materials and people into the southern ports as you suggested, General Chang.”
General Chang disregarded the last bit of obsequiousness. “My congratulations, General Lui. You have made remarkable progress, and the Central Committee is as pleased as I am. I will inform the appropriate bureaus of your readiness. I anticipate that the construction crews have been alerted and should begin arriving in ten days to two weeks. We will ship the settlers to their assigned villages as soon as they are completed. The arriving engineers have been instructed to coordinate with your local troop commanders on the defensive aspects of each village and district. They will ensure there are adequate barracks and defensive positions incorporated into each village. Your troops will form the backbone of the future militia of each village. Are there any other things you wish to report?”
“No, General Chang, I am quite pleased overall. I thank you and look forward to the arrival of the engineers and their teams.”
“Very well then, General. Continue as planned. Out here.”
After they concluded the telephone conversation, General Lui sat at his desk and composed a message for encryption. “I have completed the necessary assignments of my troops who will form the Home Guard of the new areas for settlement.
“I have ordered a coalescing of the survivors of all units that are not necessary for devil defense duties, so that our battalions which depart for Africa will be at full strength. Each division is responsible to ensure that each of its surviving battalions will be at full strength, even though there will not be enough battalions to constitute a full division. Many battalion designations will, therefore, cease to exist, but that is what we expected. I have reduced or promoted officers as required to maintain appropriate lines of authority. After this is completed, I will initiate condensing of the undermanned regiments and, ultimately, divisions, so that the surviving divisions will be fully manned. This will maintain a nominal military structure. I will have these reconstituted battalions reporting to ports of debarkation in less than three weeks. Per our plan, they will leave as soon as our new ocean-going fleet of transports arrives at the designated harbors. My troops will be waiting there for re-supply and transportation. Many of my units are on reduced rations, so it is imperative that sufficient foodstuffs be included for immediate consumption. This is particularly important for those units now destined to function as Home Guard units. Those newly constituted for transport to Africa are also in need. They should be logistically supported for the inland march to the maximum extent possible. Sufficient truck transportation remains a major impediment, as there were insufficient trucks of suitable size obtained on the peninsula. Lui.”
General Tsai’s weekly report was not so favorable. His attack was launched several weeks later over radioactive terrain, against far larger and more formidable foes: the armies and peoples of the Indian subcontinent, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. His southern armies assigned to clear the Indian Peninsula had been advancing very slowly, destroying as many people as they could. Corpses were everywhere. His disposal battalions could not keep up with providing mass burials in the areas of greater population density. Nuclear fires and the initial radiation sickness had killed tens of millions. Millions more succumbed over the ensuing months to prolonged radiation sickness that resulted from lower dosage, heat, dust, dehydration and exhaustion, and secondary infections while they fled southward in front of his armies. The southwest monsoon rains, blowing from June to September, had helped clear the air, but dust raised simply by marching and moving vehicles of all types resulted in its being inhaled, coughed up by the mucociliary apparatus of the respiratory tree and swallowed, only to exert its effect on the gastrointestinal tract. Many of his troops were suffering severe diarrhea from which they could not recover. His staff could not keep up with the specific number of casualties his armies were experiencing, so they merely provided best guesses as estimates reported by battalion commanders and assembled by the division level staffs.
His armies initially made rapid advancement along the southern boundary of the Himalayas. Two army groups, one leading westward, the other following, stretched one thousand miles from west to east. These two army groups simultaneously pivoted ninety degrees in a massive left flank movement to turn south when the advance elements of the westernmost reached the Great Indian Desert. The easternmost army corps of three divisions, he initially detailed to clear the nation of Bangladesh. Resistance was negligible. Civilian populations were not armed and so could offer little or no resistance. The Jain philosophy, especially in Gujarat, that all life is inviolate worked against the Indian civilians defending themselves as well. The swamps, marshes and rivers and tropical climate proved to be a far more formidable foe than the people. His troops were increasingly afflicted with malaria. Reports of cholera were becoming more and more common at the battalion level. Advancement was fairly rapid, up to five kilometers a day across the Indo-Gangetic Plain of the north. The two army groups were slowed, however, to progressing two to three kilometers per day through Madhya Pradesh. Now, the northeast monsoon from December through February was becoming a factor. The progress of his armies wasn’t fast enough to suit General Tsai, but the Vindhya and Satpura ranges of low mountains could not be denied. The result was those armies on the flanks were proceeding faster in the lowlands so that his armies were in a great horseshoe formation. In effect, it was something akin to an unplanned trap for the indigenous population, as the people inside the horseshoe encountered the flanking units as they fled east and west. The larger towns and cities were more or less bypassed, leaving the inhabitants to starve and die of secondary effects of the nuclear exchange. General Tsai wanted to be at the southern tip of the peninsula by early March at the latest. He realized that early May was more likely. That was in the middle of the hot season, when the remnants of his army would board the ocean going catamarans. Strange in the eyes of many, General Tsai gave the order that no wildlife of any sort was to be killed, save for poisonous snakes, the kraits, cobras and vipers.
General Tsai was pleased with the compression of his forces accorded by the geographical narrowing of the Indian peninsula as they marched southward. It allowed the same concentration of his troops to accommodate some of the losses in personnel he was experiencing. His own deceased troops were placed in the mass graves along with their victims.
General Shen, De-ming was now at the western edge of Lake Balqash (Baikal) in eastern Kazakhstan. He had detached one army group to turn southward through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and into Afghanistan. He did not expect many of this army group to survive the combination of AIDs, the harsh winter, lack of adequate caloric intake, and harassment by the Pakhtun tribes. He hoped that there would be sufficient remnants of it left that he could invade Afghanistan from the west, thereby forcing a two front war for the Pakhtuns. Even though Afghanistan was assigned to Army Front II, he wanted to make contact with General Tsai’s army group somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border if possible. He directed another army group to guard the flank, using an axis of approach through Uzbekistan and into Turkmenistan. This group was to halt operations one hundred and fifty kilometers from the Iranian border. This would tie down the armed forces of these Central Asian Republics and deny them the first army group’s right, or western, flank. His third army group, he directed to continue the attack almost due westward, with their final objective as the northern end and eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. This group was not to proceed farther westward than Balyqshi and Atyrau, cities on the northern shore. General Chang and his staff felt that Russia and Iran should not be threatened with these boundaries. Time will tell, thought Tsai.
General Shen’s subordinate generals were reporting increased resistance, particularly coming from the civilian population of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The high desert of Kazakhstan was particularly suited for armored warfare. The Russians maintained a military college at Frunze, now named Bishkek, just inside the Kyrgyzstan border and on the southern edge of the desert when Kyrgyzstan was an autonomous Soviet Republic. It seemed that every male Kazakhstani and Kyrgyzstani had a semi-automatic rifle, usually an AK-47, and a considerable supply of ammunition. The rifle cartridges bore Russian head stamps, but the rifles seemed to come from several sources; among them Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. A small number of M-16 type rifles, apparently of American manufacture, were also found on the bodies of resisting citizens.
Small bands of citizens, apparently uncoordinated, were attacking their flanks in areas of more rugged terrain, while regular army units were attacking the advance Chinese elements with artillery, armor and aircraft whenever they could isolate a unit up to a division in size. Kazakhstan army units would launch a frontal attack to slow the opposing unit, then strike at the flanks and then withdraw as quickly as they could. When the Chinese units advanced, the Kazakhstani squadrons on their flanks would renew their attacks with a vengeance. It was an effective tactic, slowing the Chinese, but nevertheless, grinding down the Kazakhstanis by overwhelming mass. The small bands of untrained citizens were usually annihilated when they did not practice good cover and concealment and strong discipline. If these bands survived a mistake, they did not make it a second time. They were becoming hardened guerillas that expected no mercy and granted none, in the most hideous ways on the few prisoners they captured.
Uzbek and Kazakh units began to attack from west to east, striking at the Chinese right flank and rear of the Chinese who turned eastward and were now attacking all along the western borders of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The mouth of every valley into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan was an avenue for attack for the Chinese. One night, several flights of Kazakh aircraft flew over, but apparently dropped their bombs only on the lead elements. Other aircraft flew at an altitude of only a few hundred feet over entrained units, but did not release any ordnance, at least any that did not explode. Anti-aircraft missiles took their toll on the old Migs of the Uzbek and Kazakh air forces as they passed overhead. Those that flew over the entrained units were equipped with spray tanks. A persistent nerve agent, a close relative of the American nerve gas VX, settled on Chinese troops and equipment. Not equipped for gas warfare, nor provided pyridostigmine pre-treatment or atropine sulfate for immediate post exposure treatment, exposed Chinese troops died by the thousands within minutes. An entire division force equivalent succumbed within ten minutes.
General Shen, De-ming decided to respond in kind. He ordered a persistent nerve agent, a chemical variant of the American agent VX, identical to the one used against his troops, sprayed over the central part of the Kazakh capital of Almaty, a city of 1.5 million people. It is just as well, he thought. It is a faster death than starvation. Since this nerve agent will remain effective for at least a week, it will cause panic among the survivors and force them out of the city and into the desert where we can more easily kill them with less loss of our own troops. Urban warfare is the most costly form of warfare, especially for the attacker. There will also be more room for mass burial for larger groups of them. The only down side is clearing the bodies from the city when we occupy it. We’ll have to build a rendering plant to handle the dead. It will result in a great deal of fertilizer. He gave the order, but it required several hundred tons of nerve agent disbursed from cargo planes equipped with oversized agricultural spray type equipment. Several soldiers assigned to the handling the fifty-five gallon drums of nerve agent died as a result of careless handling and pin holes in their protective suits.
General Shen was determined to have his troops on the Arabian Sea coast by early spring, at least what was left of them.
Special Agent James Carter and Dr. Diane Foster were walking home after their fourth date. They went to dinner on the first two, then to an early dinner followed by a movie on the third date. The team had now added half a dozen new members to provide the additional security for Dr. Foster. This time, they had a late dinner and went to a late movie. It was after 24:00 hours on Saturday night, and they were both tired but in good spirits. They were walking arm in arm. The night was cool, but a cold wind was blowing from the northeast. They held hands for a few minutes, then he sighed, smiled, squeezed her hands, and simply said, “Good night.” He turned and walked away from the door of her apartment. He went home to his own apartment, somewhat morose. This was turning into something more serious than he had anticipated, and he wasn’t quite sure how he should handle it. Equally as bad, he was uncertain how Diane Foster felt about him, or how far she would let her feelings develop. She was in her early thirties and had not had an affair for some years. Apparently, she had been romantically burned some years earlier. He sensed some caution in her. Carter knew the smart thing to do would be to talk to the Supervisory Special Agent, but that might result in his being removed from the duty. The consequence was that he might not see her as often, or if re-assigned to some demanding task force, perhaps not at all. He realized that privacy was out of the question for the time being. He decided he better let his superior know that he was developing something of an emotional attachment to Dr. Foster. After all, he was thirty-four years old. He was beginning to wonder what it would be like to have a family life.
Foster had returned to her work and buried herself in it. Many of her co-workers had noticed a subtle change in her, a cold attitude towards them that was not there before her shuttle mission. Carter had taken to calling her Di, and she called him James. They were becoming enamored with each other. At first, they had merely talked, almost on a daily basis. One day in the following week, she returned to her apartment to find that he had cooked dinner for the two of them. “Surprise, surprise,” he said as she opened the kitchen door in a very cautious manner. She knew she was under surveillance, but that didn’t lessen her apprehension when she discovered someone beating about in her kitchen. He was a pretty good cook and demonstrated it with an excellent Chinese dinner.
The following day, he dropped by after she arrived home. “I believe you like classical music. What do you say we take in the symphony this Saturday? I have two tickets to quite good seats.”
She smiled, and said, “I’d like that.”
