He said, “What?”
“We were able to stop it. China has no pretext to launch a war now. All they have is four missiles that blew themselves up over open terrain. You really need to get that to the National Command Authority, because if that carrier group postures, it could be the trigger they were looking for.”
“Are you positive about this? I mean, absolutely sure?”
“Yes.”
He said, “I gotta go.” And hung up. Ten minutes later, he called me back, now much calmer, saying, “Well, well, well, looks like you guys saved the world.”
Driving back to the hotel, Paul behind the wheel, I’d said, “My stock in trade. All it took was a bullet to my shoulder.”
He’d grown serious at that point. “Are you okay? Anybody else hurt?”
I said, “I’m not okay, but I’m not on death’s door. Jennifer got dinged up a little too, but we’re going to be fine. We might need some help to get out of here, though. I have no idea how Taiwan is going to look at our actions.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had to . . . go a little extreme.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I had to kill some people. One of them was a colonel in the ROC Air Force, but he was a traitor just like Jake Shu. The NSB guy I told you about was with me the entire way. He can back it up.”
“I thought he was disavowed?”
“He might be, but he’s a good dude. We need to protect him as well.”
Wolffe sighed, then said, “Don’t worry about any of that. With what we’ve done for Taiwan, we could make him the next president. They owe us big time. Just lay low for a couple of days, and then leave. You’re protected.”
I’d said, “Because you say so?”
I could almost see the smile through the phone when he answered. “No. Because the president of the United States says so. Trust me, you’re good.”
Two days later, I was drinking bourbon with the man who’d saved his country. We clinked glasses, took a sip, and I said, “So you’re back in the game now, huh?”
Paul said, “Yes. My computer was my passport. The proof was on it from my messages back and forth between me and my boss. The entire file about Colonel Ryan was on there. I’m no longer a Ronin. They’re even talking about giving me a medal.”
I knew that the United States had something to do with that decision, but said nothing. Brett said, “You certainly deserve it. No doubt. What about the mole you talked about before? Did they find him?”
Paul grew cold, saying, “No. They have not. He is still inside, somewhere. The game will continue, with China still fighting us.”
I said, “But at least they failed this time. It looks like the election is back on track.”
“Yes. The expertise of the United States with those videos not only helped us, but others under China’s boot as well. Nobody believes them anymore.”
He took a sip, then coughed, a deep, rattling thing.
I said, “You okay?”
He smiled and said, “Not enough rest. I caught some kind of cold and I can’t shake it.”
Acknowledgments
This has been one of the weirdest writing years I’ve had since I decided to give writing a try. I had originally planned on setting the manuscript a year after the elections in Taiwan—January of 2021—keeping the timeline intact with the release date. Then a little bug called coronavirus destroyed that notion. As I was locked in my house, like everyone else, I just couldn’t figure out a way for Pike and the team to go globetrotting around during a pandemic. Nothing I’d researched matched anymore. How would Pike conduct surveillance when the streets were essentially empty? How would the team fly between countries when there were no aircraft in the sky? In the end, I decided to simply set the novel in the fall of 2019, when I did the actual research—before the pandemic—and right before the actual elections in Taiwan.
The story itself began brewing long before our COVID trials, with little bits of information pricking me that eventually coalesced into a plot. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the biggest thing poking at me was my wife, the Deputy Commander of Everything. She has about fourteen diving qualifications and has been wanting me to set a book in Australia so she could dive the Great Barrier Reef. As much as I would have liked to set a story Down Under, I needed more than the reef for a manuscript. That something came a few years ago and planted a seed in my head.
While conducting research in Lesotho, Africa, for Operator Down, I traveled to the country’s government center, which was brand new with some areas still under construction. On the still-under-construction walls were instructions for the workers—what I assumed were the usual, “wear a hardhat” type stuff, but it was written in Chinese. I asked my guide why there were Chinese instructions when we were in Africa. She said China was footing the bill for the complete reconstruction of Lesotho’s government center. When I asked why, she said, “No reason. They just want to help.”
From my own research into Lesotho—in fact, the premise of Operator Down—I knew that it was rich in rare earth minerals and diamonds, and I found the explanation hard to believe. Inherently, I knew China wanted something in exchange—they just weren’t saying it out loud. Yet. It was my first real-world exposure to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, whereby China seeds its tentacles through the world ostensibly out of goodwill, but in reality to control. At the time, it was a side note, because Operator Down had nothing to do with China, so I let it go. And then China just kept appearing.
American Traitor was driven by four disparate factors:
1. In 2019, the Japanese lost an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter off of the Sea of Japan, in an accident that was decidedly strange. How on earth does a pilot, flying the most advanced fighter on earth, drive it into the ocean at 600 knots? I started digging into that and was surprised to find that components for the F-35 are built all over the world—to include a production facility in Australia. The DCOE had something in her favor.
2. The battle for artificial-intelligence research is reaching a crescendo, with China trying to steal everything the United States invents while simultaneously pouring billions into its own research—some done by our own American companies—and also using that technology to turn its country into a surveillance state. Deep Fakes are a real thing, and in the fight to prove a fake versus the fight to develop one, the “proving” side of the house is lagging. It has become a disinformation tool that will literally make the phrase, “Believe it when you see it” irrelevant.
3. China is expanding the Belt and Road Initiative throughout the world, using both hard power and soft power. Hard power includes building up rock atolls in the South China Sea along what they call the “nine-dash line,” basically claiming that those bits of rock are now the forward line of Chinese sovereignty located on the other side of the sea. Nobody—including the United Nations—believes it’s legal, so China uses soft power, which, in a word, is economic. Someone in the NBA supports Hong Kong in its fight for democracy against China and China stops the NBA from playing inside the country—a multimillion-dollar loss. What happens? LeBron James chastises the people complaining because it’s hurting the NBA. Disney wants to sell the movie Abominable in China? In order to do so, one of the maps in that animated picture must portray the nine-dash line, instead of the boundaries the entire world recognizes. It’s insidious, but real.