Jack Thorlin
The Lafayette Initiative
Prologue
I was at a party in Georgetown during the last stand of the Knights. Senator Cunningham (R-Virginia) had just recounted to me how she was planning to push for increased defense spending in her home state in light of the increased threat posed by the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “After all,” she said with a moderately phony solemnity, “How can they say no when our boys are dying in Taipei and singing the national anthem?”
Everyone there knew, of course, that the formerly secret American special forces unit was holed up in the American Institute in Taipei. A pitched battle had been fought hours earlier when the Chinese tried to overrun the Institute and the footage from the Knights’ helmet cameras had already been uploaded to YouTube. It had been a hard-fought, stupendous victory, and when a Knight had asked if the American flag still flew over the Institute, the Knights had sung the Star-Spangled Banner, a moment that was already being talked about across the country. Even the fairly jaded patricians of that Georgetown soiree effused over the heroism of the unit that had been disowned and betrayed by President Rodriguez.
Before I could say anything in response to Senator Cunningham, Senator Kirkland (D-Maine) loudly demanded that someone turn on the big screen TV and switch to CNN. The host complied with the request just in time to catch a blonde in the CNN studio give the latest update.
“—reports coming to us that the Knights have attempted to escape the siege of the Institute. Sources say there is a massive firefight going on right now on the street in front of the Institute and in the adjacent buildings. We will release more information when… uh, OK, we have breaking news — have we confirmed this?”
The anchorwoman’s face dropped. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a confirmed report from Brad Feldman, the New York Times journalist inside the Institute, that the Knights have been wiped out to the last man. Apparently they had received credible information that the People’s Liberation Army was about to bomb the Institute and decided to make a nearly suicidal attack on the headquarters of Marshal Deng, Chief of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army. They have apparently been successful in that attack. Marshal Deng is reported dead, as are General Verix, commander of the Knights, and his entire unit.”
Though the anchorwoman continued on, I didn’t hear her. I don’t think many in that room did. One of the less affected muttered, “Holy shit.” No one responded.
Until then, the story of the Knights had not affected me personally. I had followed the story of the Knights along with the rest of the country, reveled in the feeling that U.S. soldiers — some of whom had grown up in my hometown of Newark — were for the first time in decades fighting for an undeniably good cause and making a difference in the world.
However, most of my thinking about the war had been about business. My stock portfolio had declined about 15 % at the outset of the conflict, leaving me with a paltry $15.9 billion, but I was not losing sleep over that. My company, Merlin Printing, had been making plans to take advantage of the war to pitch our 3D printing technology as a more reliable competitor to Chinese sweatshop labor. Many of our biggest competitors, best customers, and most reliable investors were Taiwanese, and no one at Merlin Printing was quite sure how the war would ultimately affect the company.
And then suddenly the Knights had all traded in their lives in order to strike a massive blow to the Chinese. To save Taiwan.
I looked in the mirror. I, Domingo Francisco Ruiz Delgado Cortez, was thirty-five, tall, and fit enough to look dashing in a $20,000 tuxedo. My hair was perfect, the product of a $6000 haircut. I had a tan from spending most of the winter in my home in the Virgin Islands. In short, I looked every inch the successful Hispanic businessman. And yet, I suddenly felt myself bereft of dignity, as if I had showed up in my foppish party best to a marathon run.
I remembered the first time I had really thought about Taiwan. I had graduated from college as an electrical engineer and worked for a few years at an American computer manufacturer in Silicon Valley. While there, I had thought that the field of three-dimensional printing would be the next major technological revolution. With several friends, I left to start Merlin Printing.
For months, we worked on a new prototype printer and toured the world, showing off the results of our efforts to all manner of venture capitalists and investors. Complex production with trifling start-up costs, flexibility and accessibility to whatever our sophisticated printers could turn out — none of those sales pitches attracted the attention of the established VC firms. They all just wanted to know what loan guarantees we could attract from the Department of Commerce, what grants we could obtain from ARPA-E, who we knew that could fast-track our permits.
And then I got a call from New Taipei Capital, a fledgling Taiwanese bank. They did not ask about our connections. They asked to see our prototype, inquired about our plans for expansion. Then they invested.
“Is everything alright, Ding?”
I had forgotten about my date, a Brazilian model. Shaking my head, I said, “No, I have business to attend to. My driver will see you home.”
Flustered, she asked, “How will you get home?”
“I’ll walk.”
And so I did. I walked along 29th Street, thinking about the start of my company and how a group of Americans who had probably never heard of Taiwan before the war had just died to protect it.
The idea came to me about ten minutes into my walk. This book is my effort to describe the consequences which flowed inevitably from the notion hatched on that brief walk through the dark spring-time streets of Washington.
By the time I reached my penthouse apartment at the Watergate, the idea had blossomed into the rudiments of a plan.
After I entered my apartment, I took out my cell phone, which an Israeli engineer had long ago assured me was impervious to hacking. I tapped the display a few times and my assistant Diego answered. He didn’t say anything about the lateness of the call, merely responded in his reassuring way, “Yes, Mr. Cortez?”
“I want you to contact Colonel James Douglas and tell him I will be flying over to meet with him as soon as possible. Then call my pilot and tell him to have my plane ready as soon as possible for a flight to Hereford in the U.K.”
“Yes, sir. Anything else?”
Even though I had known Diego for years, I was a little disappointed that this abrupt departure to a relatively minor town in Britain could not startle the man. I hoped my next request might.
“Get Ken Dagget on the line and find out if he still has contacts at Duan Manufacturing. Tell him I want him to pass along a message to President Duan that I want to talk to a representative of the Taiwanese government about a matter of great interest to Taiwan.”
Chapter 1
Seven hours after the late-night call to my assistant, I was eating a late breakfast in Hereford, England at the Imperial Hotel with Colonel Douglas. He was not one to pass up a free meal, certainly not a free meal offered by a billionaire.
A former member of the British Special Air Service, Douglas had started his own military contractor service upon leaving the military and quickly made a name for himself. He specialized in combating insurgents and rebels, the type of war he had fought for twenty years in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indonesia. That kind of fighting also happened to be precisely the problem that hampered business in the third-world.
I had hired Douglas as a security consultant back in 2025 for a new factory I was building in Malaysia. The local Maoist rebels had been making trouble that the Malaysian government was woefully unable to stop.