As the mentor of the empress of the People's Republic of China, Wei Ho ruled a billion Chinese. Yet he knew his power to be fragile. Enemies surrounded China: the Soviet Union to the north, India to the west, the United States to the east. And within China, two decades of suffering and unending labor had sapped the revolutionary spirit of the people. Impatient with the promises of a future Marxist Utopia, they wanted the benefits of the revolution immediately. Village councils defied the Central Committee, reinstituted bourgeois crimes such as private gardens, neighborhood vegetable markets, tradesmen shops and vendors. Worker committees wanted better workers to receive more pay. These small occurrences of individual enterprise presented greater threats to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat than any foreign army.

The Gang of Four declared the Cultural Revolution, marshaling the forces of the nation's delinquent and discontented youth. Mobs destroyed every vestige of the counterrevolution, burning universities, beating teachers to death, hanging merchants, dragging the critics of the Party leadership through the streets until only bones and ragged meat remained. Chaos and murder swept China for years.

But Wei Ho and the Gang of Four could not challenge their foreign enemies with mobs. The Peoples' Army, equipped with captured Japanese weapons and castoff Russian rifles, posed no threat to any modern army. Though the physicists of China had designed and assembled an atomic bomb, China lacked the aircraft or missiles to strike a target. The regime remained vulnerable to any world power willing to mount an invasion.

Local conflict in Vietnam provided the inspiration for development and use of weapons for global conflict. Wei Ho studied the war of attrition waged between the United States and the Communists. He read the reports of action, defeats, atrocities published in America and Europe. He watched tapes of television specials condemning the American efforts to defend the Republic of South Vietnam. Nowhere did the media mention the Communist methods of control over the people. He saw photos of children killed by American air strikes, but not of village chiefs impaled on poles, no photos of village defenders' children disemboweled and beheaded, no photos of young girls with their lips cut away for smiling at American soldiers. Wei Ho discovered the peculiar Western neurosis of self-flagellation and self-deception. Americans and Europeans denied the fact of Communist atrocities, and if confronted with proof in color backed with sworn witnesses, actually believed themselves guilty for Communist murders and mutilations. This neurosis became the central concept of the conspiracy he outlined to the Gang of Four.

Communism could not hope to gain world dominance through economic force, he explained. All Communist states went bankrupt shortly after their revolutions. Slave labor by millions of political prisoners succeeded in maintaining a facade of progress, but executions and mass death soon depleted the legions of slaves. China and Vietnam had followed Stalin's methods of economic advancement and met with the same inevitable collapse.

But terror promised easy victory over the bourgeois democracies of the West. Europeans and Americans lacked the will to endure the slightest inconvenience. If an elected president or prime minister failed to maintain an ever-rising standard of living, the voters found another face and voice to speak from their televisions. If a war conflicted with the hedonism of the youth, millions marched on the capitals, demanding an end to their nations' involvement, regardless of the consequences. How would these same 'citizens respond to a war without frontiers? A war threatening every citizen with death at any moment? How many casualties would they suffer before they demanded peace at any price? Before they accepted any government? Any regime?

The weapons of this war would be compact atomic bombs. If small enough to be concealed in an automobile, Chinese — or American or European — fanatics could place the weapon in the center of any city. The Gang of Four could extend their rule to all the decadent societies of the West. The Gang of Four commanded their scientists to produce the necessary bombs.

After Mao's death, as Wei Ho prepared to attack the world's democracies, popular forces in the Communist Party, enraged by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, attacked the Gang of Four. Jiang Qing and her clique disappeared into prison. Thousands of their obsequious followers faced firing squads. Pragmatists purged the fanatics, redirected the resources of China to improving the lives of its people. The Peoples' Paradise professed Marxism, yet practiced socialism heavily laced with private enterprise.

Endless interrogation and torture broke the Gang of Four. Before following their lackeys to the execution wall, the members of the clique dictated thousand-page confessions, exposing the shadowy Wei Ho to the light of People's Justice.

Wei Ho fled China with a freight train of gold. He took sanctuary first in Cambodia as the Communist Khmer Rouge decimated their population in their drive to create a Marxist fantasy land. That horror brought economic collapse and nationwide starvation. Seeing the opportunity for quick conquest, the Vietnamese invaded. Wei Ho fled again. With a personal guard of Cambodian mercenaries, he escaped through Laos to northern Thailand, then to Burma.

He did not forget his plans for world power. In the years of his pupil's marriage to Mao Tse-Tung, when Wei Ho had ruled China through Jiang Qing, his power over the nation had been subtle yet absolute. The old warlord of drugs and prostitution lost the chance to be Emperor of the World only by a factional clash within the Communist Party.

From the mountains of Burma, with tons of gold and a mercenary army, he again plotted nuclear terrorism. His researchers found an unmined and unprotected deposit of uranium in the Andes mountains of Bolivia. His spies in the Free World's atomic industries learned of a brilliant nuclear physicist who suffered from narcotic addiction. Wei Ho's gold bought technicians who would go anywhere, serve any employer. International terrorist groups received word of opportunities for trained, disciplined soldiers.

The Empire of Wei Ho rose from the Amazon.

20

"Holy goddamn," Gadgets swore. "The Atomic Yellow Peril."

Lyons stared out at the moonlit rain forest floating past them, alone with his thoughts. Shirtless, his upper body black with genipap, he wore his gray combat pants to cover the bandage on his piranha wound. Blancanales flicked the rewind switch of the tape unit and listened to snatches of the Stony Man C1A-NSA report. After a few replays, he let Gadgets tape his acknowledgment and outgoing report. Passing the signal through the scrambler, Gadgets transmitted the message in a highspeed screech of electronic noise.

Looking aft, Blancanales checked the river. The patrol boats towed the paddle-wheeler backward downstream. Brazilian farmers in army uniforms manned the helms. If observed from the air, the men and boats would appear to be slaver-commanded.

Hammers rang on sheet metal, power drills whined as the ironsmith and his helpers fabricated boiler-plate armor for the PT boats' gunners. Other men on the paddle-wheeler's cargo deck gave the aluminum dinghies and canoe a last coat of black paint. In the ship's cabins, the Indians caught a few hours' sleep before the assault on the slaver camps.

A hand radio squawked. Gadgets monitored a report to Lieutenant Silveres from the work crew returning with the weapons and cruiser captured from the slavers.

After the Portuguese-speaking settler cut off, the lieutenant translated.

"They have the weapons. They come downstream. No problems."