Jack Thorlin
Stand of Knights: A Novel of the China-Taiwan War
Foreword
Wars dominate the chronologies of all nations and many millions of participants, but rarely does a conflict transcend the passions of the immediate participants and invade the consciousness of people everywhere. Rarer still are the primary sources of such a conflict, the words of the participants. Rarest of all is a manuscript written without the confounding gauze of time or the deliberate artifice of a self-interested memoirist. Sergeant Clay McCormick wrote just such a manuscript and handed it to me within hours of the final act of the Battle of Taipei. I am presenting his work here for the first time.
The Battle of Taipei and the history of the Knights of Taiwan stand too fresh in our memory for detached, dry, historical treatment. McCormick’s recounting does not pretend to be such an account. Instead, McCormick takes us behind the scenes, explaining how he and the other Knights experienced the events that most of the rest of the world had to follow through news stories and videos posted to YouTube.
McCormick’s story contains a number of revelations about the Battle of Taipei. I have independently verified the military actions through eyewitness accounts and, in some cases, video footage. However, I cannot directly confirm the accuracy of McCormick’s descriptions of private conversations, motives and actions. As the reader may know, I was present in the American Institute for part of the battle and, having met and talked with almost all of the people described, I think McCormick’s descriptions are credible.
I must note that McCormick in his retelling criticizes several people now deceased with a candor and ferocity that can only add to the pain the battle imparted to their loved ones. To those families, I am sorry, but their pain is not sufficient to stop the printing of this journal. The story is too important to sacrifice on the altar of politeness toward the illusions of the bereaved.
I will now step aside and let McCormick unfold the story he has so clearly earned the right to tell.
Brad Feldman
New York City
April 2029
Book 1: Wood
Chapter 1: The Officious Officer
The war of the Knights — the cataclysm of nations, ideas, philosophies going on outside the walls as I write this in Taipei— began in a stifling Venezuelan jungle. God knows how many damn bugs crawled up and down the khakis and t-shirt I was wearing instead of a combat suit. I felt weighed down by the heat and the insects, neither of which seemed dissipated at all by the onset of nighttime.
Private James LaFont relieved the boredom of the misery when he whispered to me, “You think that fat-ass is coming soon?”
I put on a pensive air. “Well, I won’t be seeing your mom until we’re back stateside. So, no, the fat-ass won’t be coming anytime soon.”
Too bad no one else was around to hear. Oh, Captain Wood was there, but he wasn’t the type to laugh at the type of jokes enlisted men tell. Maybe officers in the regular Army would do that, but not the Knights. I guess when you’re an officer of the best of the best, you don’t have to put on the chummy blue-collar air and laugh at your enlisted men’s jokes to make sure they’ll follow your orders. And it was just Captain Wood, Private LaFont, and me lying prone in the forest off the side of that damn highway in Venezuela.
Pablo Perez was the fat-ass to whom LaFont referred. He was a tubby, bombastic politician, an up and coming member of the Venezuelan nomenklatura. He was probably a couple years away from getting on the Venezuelan Politburo. I like to get to know the targets a bit more than what they look like, so I googled Mr. Perez. Turns out he was an acolyte of Hugo Chavez, a big believer in Revolution. His shtick was railing against the black market and imports from Colombia. He liked calling the black marketeers “hormigas negras” (“black ants” an online translator told me).
That detail sticks out in my mind. When I was young, I was afraid of most bugs, but never black ants. They just work hard and never bother people. If the claimants of political power around the world could be more like that, there wouldn’t be any need for people like me. And yet, children with power fantasies still love taking out the magnifying glass and burning the poor ants up. Pablo Perez was probably that kind of child once, and he grew up to go after “black ants” professionally.
I don’t know why the outgoing president authorized the mission. I guess he figured Perez might be another Chavez and that three generations of fathead lunacy in South America were enough, especially after the fiasco of the Iranian missiles being blown up in Venezuela during the Iran-Israel War. Just having orders is enough reason for me, but it is nice to have a reason to believe in the mission.
The plan was to hit Perez’s three-car convoy as it made its way from Caracas to the politico’s beach house. All well and good, but hitting cars on a highway going 65 mph is kind of tricky.
The planning division of the Knights played this one true to form by crafting a timid plan that could not fail to fail. They were always scared about leaving some sort of evidence behind implicating the U.S. in some nefarious operation in countries once scourged by colonialism. This time they didn’t want us to use any weapons that couldn’t easily be bought from arms dealers. That meant we could use basic mines and unguided rockets. No guided missiles, no smart mines, no advanced rifles, no EMP grenades.
In the abstract, one might expect simple mines to work well enough. The problem for us was created by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Militaries all over the world learned from our struggles with IEDs and set out to conquer mines. The ones designed to operate electronically were the easiest to jam. Much more difficult were the pressure mines, the ones that triggered mechanically when a large enough weight got on top of them. By 2020, optical and x-ray scanners were advanced enough to scan ahead of a vehicle and identify those mines. So, if you had enough money for jammers and scanners, you didn’t have to worry about mines. You could detect them a hundred yards out and evade.
The Chinese started selling their jammers and scanners all over the world a couple years back, including to their socialist pals in Venezuela. We didn’t know if Perez’s security outfit would have the jammers. The planning boys (especially Captain Wood) were content to assume that the Venezuelans wouldn’t waste precious jamming systems on security for mid-level officials.
“But, Captain Wood, sir,” I asked when he told me the plan, “it stands to reason that if we’re going after the baddie, his own side will think he’s important enough for good security. Besides, what do those systems cost now? A hundred-thousand bucks? A three car security detail costs way more than that. And if they’ve got the scanners and jammers, all we can do is shoot unguided rockets at them. What are the chances of hitting all three cars with unguided rockets? We have to lead the cars just the right amount and even then we might not kill all the passengers if we don’t hit the gas tank or get the rocket to explode in the passenger compartment.”
Wood just gave me that patient, irritating grin he adopts when he’s explaining something he thinks is simple. “If the mines work, we’ll only have to hit two cars. If the mines don’t work, we just back off and let him go through. No big loss. Anyway, we’ll just have to practice on the battle simulator until we’re good enough to hit the moving cars.”