he was forced to deal with in the early 1980s. But this loss had tempered him; he would not willingly wish it upon anyone else, but he had managed to overcome it, and applied its lessons well.
His assets now totaled close to a billion dollars US; he owned pieces large and small of businesses throughout the world as well as the Republic of China – Taiwan to the outside world. In fact, his wealth was so extensive he needed two of his three grandsons – his only son had died more than a decade before – to manage it. They were given relatively free hands, as long as they did not break his cardinal rules: no investment in Japan, and no dealings with the communist mongrels under any circumstances.
Others on the island were not so fastidious, and in their eagerness to enrich themselves had prepared the nation for the ultimate treachery – surrender to the communists.
It was coming. Several months before, the provinces had clashed. At first, the Americans had seemed to help them; Mainland bases were bombed in a spectacular campaign referred to by the media as ‘Fatal Terrain.’ Had the war proceeded then, reunification might have been possible. But the Americans had proven themselves interested only in preserving the status quo. Worse, the government on Taiwan – the rightful representatives of all China, in Chen Lee’s view – lost face and gave way to a group of men who could only be called appeasers. In a matter of weeks, the president was due to fly to Beijing for talks with the mongrels who had usurped the homeland.
The meeting would be the first of many.
Chen Lee was determined not to let it take place. He was willing, in fact, to spend his entire fortune to stop it.
He was willing to go further. He would give his own life so that his grandchildren’s children might once more live freely in their homeland.
Was he willing to give their lives as well?
The Scotch burned the sides of his tongue.
He was willing to let them die, yes. Even his favorite grandchild, Chen Lo Fann. Indeed, Fann had volunteered to do so many times already.
Would he give up the lives of his great-grandchildren, the sweet little ones?
As he asked the question, he saw the faces of the little ones, whose ages ranged from two to ten.
No, he would not wish any harm to them, boy or girl. That was why he must act immediately.
The Americans had interfered, preventing what should have been a war between the communists and India – a war he had clandestinely encouraged.
Chen Lee took another sip of his drink. He had to encourage a wider war, one that would involve all of South Asia and the mongrels. Even if the war did not lead to conquest of the stolen provinces, it would at least halt the present slide toward accommodation.
It might yet yield conquest, thanks to the weapons he had developed and secreted away. But he felt he could not share them with the present government, headed as it was by traitors. He would have to follow his own path.
Chen Lee was bitterly disappointed in the Americans, whose ill-considered attempts at imposing peace merely made the world safe for the mongrel usurpers. During the course of his life, Chen Lee had had many dealings with Americans; he admired them in many ways. But ultimately, he found them weak and undisciplined.
He knew too that their aims were not his aims. They protected the Republic of China only when it suited them.
So be it. If the Americans intervened again, their blood would flow.
Air Force High Technology Center/Whiplash Complex (aka Dreamland) 4 September 1997, 0700
Jennifer Gleason pushed back a strand of her long hair and leaned forward, her nose nearly against the large flat panel of the computer display, as if close proximity to the line of code might reveal more detail.
The line itself was abstract and seemingly meaningless:
AAA488570C6633CO2222222222BCO354777
But to the computer expert, the gibberish told an ominous tale. She picked up the pencil she had laid on the desk nearby, twirling it in her finger before copying the line on a yellow pad nearby.
‘Pad and pencil – never a good sign,’ said an acerbic voice behind her.
‘Hi, Ray,’ she said before double-checking her copy against the screen.
‘Well?’ Dreamland’s senior scientist Ray Rubeo stood over her, squinting down at the screen.
‘Our compression algorithm.’
‘Yes,’ said Rubeo.
‘It doesn’t prove anything. The algorithm itself could have come from a bunch of places.’
Instead of answering, Rubeo stooped to the workstation next to her, quickly tapping a pair of keys and bringing up a small snippet of video. A gray shadow of an aircraft banked and turned away in the screen.
The image had been built from a fleeting radar contact made several days before in the South China Sea, during a bloody battle between the Chinese and Indian navies. A Dreamland Megafortress called Quicksilver had tried to stop the conflict, and in the process had been shot down. Four of the six crew members aboard had died.
Quicksilver, with the help of other Dreamland air and ground assets known collectively as Whiplash, had forestalled a nuclear confrontation between the two Asian powers and saved millions of lives. Four lives for a million. Most people would think that a worthwhile trade-off.
The equation was difficult when it involved people you knew. Jennifer, one of the top scientists at the facility, knew all of them very well. She was thankful at least that the pilot, Breanna Stockard, had been spared. Bree was her lover’s daughter, and while the two women had never gotten along particularly well themselves, Jennifer could not have borne the hurt Bree’s death would have caused the colonel.
Jennifer watched as the three-dimensional blob reappeared in the right-hand corner of Rubeo’s screen, commanded to reappear by Dreamland’s senior scientist. It twisted and jerked left, then down and over to the opposite corner of the screen. The simulation multiplied real time by a factor of twenty, so that the blob stayed on screen for an entire minute, rather than the three seconds it had appeared on the original radar.
Those three seconds, along with the five seconds’ worth of radio transmission Jennifer was studying on her own terminal, were enough to have cost both her and Rubeo several days’ worth of sleep. For together they meant there had been another unmanned robot plane in the air about seventy-five miles from the Megafortress when it was shot down.
And not just an ordinary ‘robot,’ or unmanned aerial vehicle, commonly known as a UAV. The experts interpreted the poor quality of the radar returns to indicate that the tiny aircraft was faceted much the way first-generation Stealth fighters were; the blanks in the simulation that made the plane jerk across the screen were a function of weak or missing radar returns. The experts had also determined that the craft had been going somewhere around 400 knots and took a turn sharp enough to pull close to ten g’s.
Designing and building a small aircraft – its wingspan appeared to be under ten feet – was certainly difficult, but the real achievement was controlling the robot. To make it fly and maneuver in real time took considerable skill, skill that until now had resided only at Dreamland. While there was a variety of UAVs around, most flew preprogrammed courses or went relatively slowly. Only the U/MF-3 Flighthawks developed at Dreamland were capable of high-speed maneuvers and aerial combat.
Imitation might be the highest form of flattery, but in this case it could also be deadly. Properly handled, the U/MF-3s were almost impervious to American defenses. If the ghost clone – one of the techies had named it that while reviewing the radar and telemetry intercepts – was armed, no part of the country would be safe.
‘So whose is it?’ asked Rubeo, voicing the question of the hour.
‘Could