Shadows of War Read Free

direction are they coming from?
    The camp, now to his right. Southeast.
    Did they see me, or only hear me running through the forest?
    It must have been the latter; if they’d seen me, they would have shot immediately.
    The questions continued, as did the answers. Josh moved very slowly now, so slowly that at times he felt that he was sleeping standing up.
    What do I have with me? A weapon?
    Nothing of use. He had the little Flip 5 video camera in his pocket, left there after the evening campfire when he’d amused his colleagues by interviewing them. He had a lighter, Tom’s, which he’d used to light the lantern and failed to give back. He had a guitar pick, from Sarah, a token of good luck she’d slipped into his hand at the airport.
    No weapon, no gun.
    The noises he’d heard drifted away. But he sensed they were still hunting him, just as long ago the killers had followed. They had wanted
to kill him not because he was a witness; their twisted minds didn’t care about that. To them there was no possibility of being caught, let alone punished. They wanted him the way a hungry man wants food. Killing his family had whetted their appetite, and now they were insatiable.
    He saw rocks ahead. Slowly, he walked to them.
    The outcropping was just at the edge of a slope of bamboo stalks.
    Hide in the bamboo?
    No. It was too thin—someone with a nightscope could see him.
    Move through it. There would be another place to hide somewhere.
    Josh began moving to his left. There was something to his right, something moving.
    He lowered himself to his haunches slowly, crouching, not even daring to breathe.
    Perhaps I’m already dead, he thought. Perhaps these are the last thoughts that will occur to me.
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    Jing Yo stopped and turned to Private Po, waiting for the rifleman to catch up. While splitting his small team up made tactical sense, it carried an inherent risk. There was no way for the groups to communicate with each other. Like in every other unit in the Chinese army, none of the enlisted men were supplied with radios.
    Officially, this was due to equipment shortages. The real reason was to make it more difficult for the enlisted men to organize a mutiny. The fear was well warranted; Jing Yo had heard of two units rebelling against their commander’s orders over the past few months. One of these actions amounted to only a few men who balked at being transferred from the northern provinces where they had been stationed for years. The other was much more serious: two entire companies refused to muster in protest of their failure to get raises. Both cases had been dealt with harshly; the units were broken up, with the ringleaders thrown into reeducation camps.
    Their officers suffered more severe punishment: execution by firing squad.
    â€œOur quarry has stopped somewhere,” Jing Yo told Private Po. “See what you can see in that direction there.”
    The private raised his rifle and looked through the scope. The electronics in the device were sensitive to heat, and rendered the night in a
small circle of green before the private’s eyes. Unfortunately, the thick jungle made it difficult for him to see far.
    â€œNothing,” whispered Private Po.
    Jing Yo became an eagle in his mind’s eye, rising above to view the battlefield. The mountain jutted up sharply ahead; the jungle diminished, leaving vast swaths of bamboo and rock as the only cover. A skilled man trying to escape them would stay in the deep forest.
    But was their quarry skilled? There were arguments either way. On the one hand, he had made enough noise for an otherwise incompetent soldier to hear him. On the other, he had left no obvious trail in the thick brush, and was now making no sound that could be heard.
    There is no silence but the universe’s silence.
    His mentors’ words came back to him. On the surface, the instruction was simple enough: One must learn to listen correctly; hearing