Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,3

in the wall behind it.

Giang jumped back as the speaker came to life again. “Push the white button to speak, and I will hear you.”

Doing as he was told, Giang slowly related his story. The village. The sudden deaths. The fear of plague. Trung listened closely, nodding, but asking no questions. When Giang’s tale came to an end Trung pursed his lips. “The doctors who tested you last night found only a flu, which is typically treatable.”

A smile crept onto Giang’s face. He would survive!

“But . . .” Trung’s face turned deadly serious. “We exposed some men to your saliva last night. Two fell dead this morning. Three others are feeling fine, but we believe they will die soon enough, just as you will.”

Giang sat on the cot, his mind a swirl of emotions. The military could help. They had special medicines. Surely they could cure him. He stood and pushed the white button. “You must do something!”

“Perhaps,” Trung said. “Is there anything you overlooked in your story? Maybe something entered your village a few days before the first man died? Did anything strange happen? If we can locate the source . . .”

Trung paused, watching through the glass as Giang’s eyes rolled back in his head. Then the man disappeared below the window, slumping to the floor. Trung peered down at the body. Dead.

Trung rolled his eyes in annoyance.

He exited the small two-room building on the outskirts of his base. As he closed the door behind him, he turned to the four men waiting for him. “Burn it down.”

As the four men doused the building with gasoline, Trung advanced across the dirt-covered central quad of the base. Technically, this was a training facility for the Vietnam People’s Army, but two years ago it had been acquired by Trung and his elite Death Volunteers. The unit had been formed during the Vietnam War and as a tribute to this, they still referred to themselves as part of the Vietnamese People’s Liberation Army, as an homage to those who came before.

His men were the best Vietnam had to offer and had been since the Vietnam War. They trained in jungle warfare, preparing for what they felt was the inevitable invasion by the west . . . again. Trung’s own father had been a soldier with the Vietcong and his stories of defeating the superior forces and technology of America had inspired Trung’s childhood fantasies. And now he was in a position to defeat them himself, should they be foolish enough to return.

Whatever Giang had brought out of the jungle was new, of that he had no doubt. The symptoms and tests revealed a flu, but the end result was unheard of. What he did know was that, once exposed, his enemies would simply fall over dead before realizing anything was amiss. Entire armies or cities could be wiped out without a shot being fired. It was the perfect weapon. But it could not be used in combat. Not yet. Not until he had the cure.

Twenty men, his best, stood waiting for orders; he issued them without pause, telling the men about the strange virus that infected Giang, and what they needed to do about it.

THEY ENTERED THE jungle and hiked for three days before reaching the Annamite range. A day’s hike into the mountains, a mere half mile from where Anh Dung was shown on the map, the man on point called a halt.

He’d heard something.

Trung trusted his men implicitly, and the man on point had ears like a dog’s. The sound that came next could have been heard by the deaf. It was a shout. A scream really. But not human. And the source . . . it rose up all around. His men took up positions, forming a circle around him, covering the jungle in all directions.

The sound came in cascades, washing over the men as the trees above them swayed in a fresh breeze.

Then, tearing through the din came a voice. A man. He shouted a single word . . . in English. “Now!”

The jungle exploded. Tree limbs fell from above. Ground cover burst into the air. Stones and branches soared at them from a distance. For a moment Trung believed the attack, primitive and ineffectual as it was, came from the frightened women of Anh Dung. But the male voice—commanding, as though speaking to soldiers . . .

Trung realized too late that the chaos concealed an advancing force. A diversion. His men, trained to hold their fire