PROLOGUE

Fujian Province, PRC, Sunday, March 5, 2000, 10:00 PM (GMT+8)

Hu Ping-Tao dropped down the hillside and rolled into the weeds. He flipped the night vision goggles (NVG) over his eyes. The gray green shaded world leaped at him from the evening gloom. Ping-Tao wondered how long the lithium batteries would continue to operate. He had been running every night since Tuesday, finding a hidey-hole or tree to sleep in during the day and making his way across Fujian to the areas indicated on his map.
      Fujian Province rested on the mainland side of the Taiwan Strait—one hundred sixty kilometers of water separating darkness from light. The battle was long, bitter, and often punctuated by the winds of war. It started over fifty years ago when Chiang Kaishek lost his war against Mao Zedong. The ancient struggle amongst China’s warlords garnered the trappings of the broader world’s rivalry—east versus west, the Cold War, and the new world order.
      Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB) sent Ping-Tao and several others like him to find the truth. The NSB is responsible for Taiwan’s military intelligence and is closely connected to the island nation’s defense establishment. Closeted in one of the concrete rooms beneath the surface of Kinmen Island, Ping-Tao and a briefing officer reviewed satellite imagery providing incredible detail. Ping-Tao presumed the images were hijacked from a Japanese spy satellite. The Japanese jealously guarded their secrets, but in a digital age of microwave relays, massive code cracking mainframes, and antennae farms, no electronic signals remained inviolate. The digital enhancement suggested the wizards at the United States National Reconnaissance Office had cleaned the images. Twelve areas were marked. They were the same twelve marked on his map.
      Taiwan’s upcoming elections provoked harsher than normal rhetoric from Beijing. The successors to the men who fought Mao at the end of the Second World War worried about missile strikes, invasion, and possible annihilation. Beijing threatened the powerful Americans with nuclear obliteration, the Japanese with domination, and Taiwan with slavery. It was a dangerous game of brinkmanship.
      Five days ago, Ping-Tao left Kinmen Island for the mainland. Kinmen is one of those territorial anomalies poised between the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the rebel Taiwanese Republic of China (ROC). Technically, Kinmen and Matsu islands are counties within Fujian Province’s territory. The islands lay approximately thirty kilometers off the mainland, where Taiwan is another one hundred thirty kilometers across the Taiwan Strait. The ROC retains control of the islands maintaining a stubborn military presence within sight of the mainland. It is an uneasy peace.
      Taiwan straddles the sea-lanes between the East China and South China Seas. It faces the massive Chinese mainland to the west, the Philippines to the south, and the Korean Peninsula to the north. Almost sixty years ago, General Douglas MacArthur considered the same problem and concluded an amphibious assault designed to evict the Japanese army from Taiwan would be too costly. It was a judgment from a day before supersonic aircraft, a fire sale on slightly used Soviet military transports, and short-range ballistic missiles.
      The diplomatic fiction that only one China exists enables the fifty-year-old dispute to continue and prevents turning the turquoise sea into a bloody killing field. There are those who still cling to the dream that Taiwan will one day liberate the mainland. The practical realities of a twenty-two million man nation state defeating the mainland population of 1.2 billion creeps further into the fantasy realm every day. Beijing continues to demand reunification—surrender would be the proper term—and each day they slip closer to a deadly conflagration.
      The wildcard in the entire mix remains the American President and the Seventh Fleet. No one in Taipei or Beijing is exactly certain of what the American response would be to action in the Taiwan Strait. Would the American President send the Stars and Stripes into harm’s way to defend a concept of liberty and self-determination, or would the single remaining superpower retreat into the cozy isolation provided by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans? A more pressing question was what the lame duck President would do in the face of a determined effort at forced reunification? The crazy Americans were once again embroiled in one of their quadrennial seasons to elect a new president, and the issues of war and peace were equally murky.
      Ping-Tao slid across the ground until he found the small bunker lit by a kerosene lamp and two soldiers squatting with their rifles resting on their knees. The orange embers from the cigarettes blazed the brightest green in his NVG world. Their voices floated across the ground between Ping-Tao and the bunker. It was the vehicle stationed behind the bunker that brought Ping-Tao to this dangerous place and caused him to hazard his life. A twelve-meter flatbed tractor-trailer was parked under the trees. It was difficult to see from the air with normal surveillance techniques, but it was clearly visible to the orbiting American reconnaissance satellites.
      The dark green-skinned missile sat on an erector style launcher under camouflage nets. It was a little less than eleven meters long and weighed less than fifteen thousand kilograms. Dong Feng—East Wind—the DF-21 missile rested on its launcher. The DF-21 is capable of launching a six hundred kilogram warhead containing chemical, nuclear, biological, or convention munitions, and it can strike targets in Vietnam, Northern India, and Taiwan. Its very existence began to fuel an arms race from Tokyo to Seoul to Taipei. The gray men reporting to their masters in 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue got a littler grayer as they watched the PRC’s ambitious expansion continue.
      The missile and its launcher were parked under trees fifty meters from the bunker. Ping-Tao was one of many agents delivered to the mainland shore with a simple map, a small burst transmitter, a Colt Python .357 Magnum, and a cyanide capsule. This was the last site on his map. If Ping-Tao survived tonight, he intended to take a long hot shower and sleep between clean sheets.
      Ping-Tao slid by the bunker, and after thirty minutes he found himself below the tractor-trailer. He glanced over to the two soldiers. One had fallen asleep and the other had wandered into the bushes. Ping-Tao pulled himself beneath the camouflage netting. He removed his combat knife from its scabbard. He rested his hand on the skin expecting to feel the coolness of the thin metal skin. Instead, he found something thicker and lighter. The surface was bumpy to the touch. He had seen this before.
      He etched the knife down the side of the missile and a thin peal of wood curled up under the tip of his blade. The missile resting on the erector launcher was nothing more than a wooden shell painted to look like a DF-21 missile. Out of twelve sites he had investigated, seven were empty, four contained woodened decoys, and one contained a real weapon. Where were the real missiles?