“I think,” Han said — this time surprising Wu—“that what Lieutenant Wu means is that China’s casualties in America might grow intolerable.” Wu ground his teeth at his father’s opportunism. Han had sensed that Wu’s idea had traction, and he was making it his own. “Perhaps we might approach Liu when popular support for the military has eroded due to a costly, grinding, exquisitely bloody campaign. And in that weakened political condition,” Han proposed as he sat back in satisfaction, “we might restore the country’s political balance to the center.”
“I mean,” Wu interjected, “that Defense Minister Liu may already be troubled by the casualty projections, and the time to approach him is not after we lose ten million dead, but before!”
They ignored Wu’s point, and by the end of the teleconference they had adopted Han’s plan. They were to monitor closely the results of the military campaign and assess the evolving political consequences. Wu noted, to his disgust, how worried all four men were by the success of their country’s two invasions.
Wu went back to his suite, stripped naked, and crawled into bed. Shen Shen conformed herself to his back, skin to skin. “Does it bother you?” she asked softly. “Being in America? Being half American?”
He pulled free and rose with such force that he took the satin sheet with him and almost spilled Shen Shen onto the floor. “I am not half American!”
“Oh, no-I-didn’t-mean-that!” she shrieked. She was panicked and horrified at her misstep. She held her hand out to him then brought it back to her mouth to cover her sobs.
“I am Chinese!” Wu said. “I am… Chinese!”
“…many armored vehicles!” shouted the forward air force’s air observer over his radio.
Sergeant Conner Reilly monitored the radio nets as he sighted his shoulder-fired, all-threat missile on the lead main battle tank. “Heading north on I-5 past Mission Bay!” the air force lieutenant croaked through a parched throat. “Main battle tanks! Armored fighting vehicles! Armored missile carriers! Armored rocket launchers! Amphibious assault craft! Self-propelled artillery! Self-deploying bridging equipment!” The FO had to pause to swallow. To breathe. Conner’s heart pounded, and his own throat felt as if it were pinched between his finger and thumb. “Estimated at least regimental size! Say again. At least regimental size!”
Conner commanded the FO’s small security team. One squad of armored cavalry scouts. Nine men. One woman. They were dismounted because they had flown in on requisitioned civilian airliners from Tennessee, where they had been poised and waiting for a long-planned and well-rehearsed counterattack against Chinese-held Gulf Coast ports. Their armored fighting vehicles were being loaded aboard much slower rail transport.
The ten armored cavalrymen and women — seat fillers on an aircraft filled with a company of combat engineers — had landed at Miramar Naval Air Station the day before, two days after the first Chinese landings in California. When Conner stepped through the plane’s door, the sound of distant fighting had hit him. A continuous rumble over the horizon toward the beach and city to the southwest. Sitting on the tarmac and waiting for orders or transport had been thousands upon thousands of troops with nowhere to go and nothing to do. The army’s typical disorganization had angered Conner. It was obvious which way the enemy was.
He had led his nine soldiers in search of a mission. They had found the air force lieutenant wandering among clusters of harried army officers trying to bring order to the chaos. “Just give me somebody!” the guy had demanded. “I’ve got my equipment! We’ve got the ordnance airborne! I just need a security team so I can get up to the fucking line and call it in!”
Conner had pulled the man aside, and they had a mission ten minutes after landing. Five minutes later, a smiling, eager Hispanic house painter had offered to give them a ride in his pickup. Conner and the air force officer had ridden in the unairconditioned cab. Conner’s cavalrymen had climbed into the back with the painter’s teenage son. “I talked to my cousin,” the grinning man reported, clearly happy to be of help. “They’re coming up I-5.”
“Then let’s go to I-5,” the air force guy had said, looking at Conner. Conner shrugged and nodded.
Off they had driven. Traffic jams had forced detours through the front yards of homes whose owners were frantically packing. Military policemen at checkpoints brandishing loaded M-16s had at first leveled their weapons on the wildly weaving, paint-flecked pick-up. But when the driver had lain on his horn and the MPs had seen his load of combat-bound troops they had waved them through the barricades toward the coast without stopping them.
As they neared I-5, the traffic had come to a complete stop. It was a parking lot filled with angry drivers standing beside their open doors and craning their necks to see what the holdup was. Conner had ordered his men to dismount and had thanked the always smiling painter. His son had climbed into the cab.
“Vayan con dios, amigos!” the man had shouted to Conner and his men as they began to climb a dry hill.
“Give ’em hell!” his son had called out before saying to his father, “Let’s go back and get some more!” The truck had made a U-turn and headed back in the direction of the Naval Air Station.
At the top of the hill, they had seen blue water, but they had no idea where they were. Conner and the air force lieutenant had returned to the road and gone from car to car until he’d found a family with a map. The air force guy had pulled out a portable scanner and swiped the image of the map into his palmtop. He printed out eleven copies, and they were in business.
For the first few hours, they had seen nothing but panicked refugees. They had set up on the hillside overlooking Mission Bay and watched as both north- and southbound lanes of Interstate 5 had filled with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing San Diego toward Los Angeles in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But the sound of the fighting carried. The crumps and bangs were near constant.
By late afternoon, they had begun playing a game of cat-and-mouse with pilotless Chinese reconnaissance drones. When a drone had finally clearly spotted them — flying in lazy circles overhead like a vulture — Conner had fired a shoulder-launched missile from the hilltop. An explosive burst of gasses had belted the slender missile from its disposable tube and rocked him backward a step. At a safe distance of about thirty feet in the air, the weapon’s rocket motor had ignited. The drone hadn’t even bothered to take evasive action, but had instead continued its tight circle above their position beaming images back to some Chinese command post of a lone American soldier standing out in the open. Just before the drone had disappeared in a ball of flame to the exultant cheers of his well hidden troops, Conner had vigorously thrust his middle finger skyward to give the camera and its remote operators one last, defiant pose.
The smoking debris from the drone had dented rooftops and smashed windshields of family cars clogging the highway, further panicking drivers. Conner decided that they had to relocate because their position was in the Chinese databanks. As they climbed through the hills, they lost sight of the Interstate. But horns that had begun blowing upon the downing of the drone continued to sound for an hour. By the time they set up in their current position, the traffic flowing out of San Diego was flowing again and growing ever lighter.