Shadow Kings

Contents

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

PART TWO

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE COVER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For

Parker and Erin Jeanne and generations to come

Of all enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

James Madison

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

Benjamin Disraeli

In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

A little revolution is a good thing.

Thomas Jefferson

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

A dense blanket of fog enveloped the ship, at once smothering the wind and suppressing all other sensations of sound, light, and motion.

The sailors had felt it coming, that first arctic blast of winter, and had navigated the icy breezes for several days, making their way south along the coast with the great blue ocean to the west. During the previous night the chill winds had subsided, and the fog had risen almost undetected from the stillwarm waters, until the stars and moonlit clouds had slowly faded in the deepening gloom. The murkiness of the shrouded dawn had lingered well past noon, and the great ship drifted aimlessly under its massive luffing sails.

Suddenly, as if passing through an invisible barrier, the ship’s bow broke through the towering wall of the fog bank, and into the bright sun of a cloudless day. In the distance off to port, three smaller ships from their convoy had already entered the sunlight, and beyond them could once again be seen the low landmass of the coastline they had been following for days. To their surprise, however, a similar stretch of land now greeted them off the starboard side, with nothing but open ocean ahead.

A slight breeze would carry the ships on the same eastward course for the remainder of the afternoon, when abruptly the coastline to port fell away in a northerly direction. With a grouping of small islands to the east, the explorers kept the coastal land on their port side and followed it steadily as it took them once again to the north.

It would be many days before they would determine that they had successfully sailed around a huge island and were once again heading south along the same coastline they had charted only weeks before.

The year was 1422, and although the Chinese sailors could not yet describe their journey in terms we could relate to today, they had just circumnavigated the landmass now known as Vancouver Island, and the coastline they would soon follow to the south was America.

It doesn’t take much to change the world.

Sometimes all it takes is an act of nature. Sometimes an act of man.

For instance, a flash of lightning is, more often than not, little more than a momentary bright spot in a dark sky, a benign and beautiful demonstration of nature’s glory. But sometimes, maybe that once in a million times, that beautiful act of naturebecomes an even more awesome Act of God. When conditions coincide in time and place, and events transpire which affect significantly the course of history, acts of nature become Acts of God. If a tree falls unwitnessed in the forest, does it make a sound? Surely it does, but without someone to hear it, who would care? However, if that same tree were to fall on a world leader, the reaction would be deafening, and many would attribute it to an Act of God. The act is the same whether initiated by God or by nature, so that distinction is basically irrelevant. What is important is not the act itself, but the human perception of its cause, and the human reaction to the result. In this world, man is the center of the universe.

The annals of history are full of acts of God and nature. Some are given more importance than others, distinguished by their size or the extent of the consequences, or simply the extent of the interaction of a particular event and those human beings who witnessed it. When such an interaction occurs, it is the perception of the event and the way it is related that gives it its standing in the context of history. So it is that our conceptions of history, and of truth itself, are subject to the interpretations of our predecessors. And, as we shall see, where man is relied upon to interpret events, history, and truth, often suffer. While it is true that fact can be stranger than fiction, it is also sometimes true that ‘fiction’ may be more truthful than ‘fact’.

As an example, please consider the role of the great European explorers in the discovery and colonization of the Western Hemisphere. History has long told us that Christopher Columbus first discovered North America in 1492, and that Ferdinand Magellan first circled the globe in 1521, rounding the tip of South America through the passage which now bears his name. These are well known and accepted facts. While these accomplishments are seldom disputed, what makes them accepted historical facts is simply the human consensus of opinion surrounding the stories and their corroborating evidence. The point is that the human perception of events should not by itself be substituted for fact. Human perceptions, and therefore the ‘facts’, can be manipulated and misrepresented; thus the ‘truth’ may only be known at the expense of the ‘whole truth’.

In the case of the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, a book by Gavin Menzies entitled 1421, The Year China Discovered America introduces startling new information which, when accepted by the human consensus of opinion, will cause the history of the era to be re-written. It is a fascinating story, and an excellent example of the truth being corrected by the whole truth.

In the late Thirteenth Century, Mongols under the great Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, took control of China. Nearly a century later, a combination of floods, famine, and peasant revolt brought a new leader to power, Zhu Yuanzhang, who was the first emperor of a new dynasty, the Ming. His son, Zhu Di, took control of China at the start of the Fifteenth Century, and began one of the country’s great periods of growth and exploration. Among his first accomplishments was the commissioning of a project to preserve all known literature and knowledge, which led to the creation of an encyclopedia with over four thousand volumes. Hundreds of printed novels were available to the public some thirty years before the printing of Gutenberg’s Bible in Europe.

To the west, Zhu Di sought to rebuild the Great Wall, and to re-establish the Silk Road trade routes inland to the Middle East. Being of Mongol descent, Zhu Di also directed the relocation of the Chinese capitol to the northern city of Ta-Tu, which he would later rename Beijing. There he built the famous Forbidden City, a project so vast that its completion nearly bankrupted the entire country. The Grand Canal from Nanjing to Beijing was enlarged to accommodate huge barges of grain to feed the massive work force, and hundreds of thousands of acres of Chinese forests were razed for the construction of the city, as well as the barges and other ships at the center of Zhu Di ‘s imperial plan.

Long before the Europeans sought to establish trade routes to China and the Spice Islands, the Chinese plied their own routes throughout the South Pacific and Indian Ocean. Much ofthe Chinese economy depended on trade, and the extensive tribute system imposed on neighboring countries for the privilege of trading with China and the protection of those trade routes. It was Zhu Di’s wish to extend China’s rule to the ends of the earth and make Beijing the center of the global empire. To that end Zhu Di commissioned a major expansion in the size of his maritime fleet, an effort which consumed nearly all of the available timber from China to Vietnam.

On February 2, 1421, Zhu Di celebrated Chinese New Year’s Day with the inauguration of the Forbidden City, entertaining heads of state from all over the Asian empire, Arabia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. For the next month those leaders were wined, dined, and concubined, and when it was time for them to return to their native lands, they were treated to one final taste of the power and imperial glory of what was China in 1421. Following a two-day barge float down the Grand Canal to the Yellow Sea, the dignitaries were no doubt awed by the sight of the huge Chinese armada anchored there. Foremost in the fleet were more than one hundred nine-masted sailing junks, each measuring some 480 feet long and 180 feet wide; virtual floating cities. Built of double-planked teak, with sixteen individual watertight sections patterned after the bamboo plant, the colossal ships were nearly unsinkable, and with their stores of food and water could stay at sea for months without making landfall. In support of the great junks were hundreds of smaller merchant junks, each more than twice the size of the flagship Columbus would later sail, and surrounding these were squadrons of faster, more maneuverable warships. The sight of this vast armada left no doubt that China was indeed the world’s first superpower.

The armada was to be divided into four separate fleets, each dispatched to sail to the ends of the oceans and beyond, to trade and collect knowledge, and expand the burgeoning Chinese empire. At the center of the Forbidden City was an astronomical observatory, and with these ships went the foremost astronomers and cartographers of the time. In brief, their accomplishments included the perfection of celestial navigation, and the accuratecharting and mapping of nearly the entire globe. For close to three years these fleets navigated virtually every mile of coastline on every continent in both hemispheres, including Antarctica and the Arctic, while avoiding only the already charted lands surrounding Western Europe. North America itself was explored extensively by two separate fleets, that of Zhou Wen on the west coast and Zhou Man on the east; they went so far as to navigate the largest rivers, and leave behind colonists to settle the new lands in the name of the Chinese empire. It was no wonder, then, that when Columbus made his historic landfall seventy years later, he believed he had made it to China, for among the inhabitants of the islands he discovered, some were in fact Chinese. The truth is that Columbus did not actually know where he was, but the Chinese did.

But why is it that our version of history is so vastly different? Blame it on an Act of God. While there should be little doubt that the events surrounding the exploration of the Western Hemisphere by the Chinese transpired much as I have described, a concurrent chain of events occurred which altered the way that history was perceived by the generations who followed.

While Zhou Wen, Zhou Man, and the other Chinese admirals were circling the globe a hundred years before Magellan, changes back home in China came fast and hard. Already on the verge of bankruptcy as a result of the tremendous expansionist effort put forth by Zhu Di, the relocation of the nation’s capital and construction of the massive Forbidden City, the Grand Canal, and the rebuilding of the Great Wall, China faced new disorders in the form of a series of rebellions in its distant regions to the south, along with widespread famine and disease. The Emperor Zhu Di was already under strict scrutiny when, on the eve of May 9, 1421, barely two months after the great armada had left China, a bolt of lightning ignited a fire in the Forbidden City, claiming the life of Zhu Di’s favorite concubine and burning much of the new Chinese capitol to the ground. Emperor Zhu Di, the Son of Heaven, was a devoutfollower of Confucianism, and believed that his rule was a mandate from heaven. For him, and many of his detractors as well, such a fire could only mean that he had somehow disgraced himself before the gods, and that a new emperor was called for. The result was that, even before the first ships from the great armada began arriving back in China toward the end of 1423, the entire focus of Chinese rule had shifted away from foreign exploration and expansionism, and China began to rapidly turn inward to focus on a new era of isolationism. Instead of being welcomed home as heroic explorers, the returning seamen were ostracized, and their great ships left to rot at anchor. Furthermore, all records of their amazing journeys were ordered to be destroyed, and all colonists they had left behind all over the world were abandoned to their own fate. In this way, one of the great exploratory periods in world history, with some of the greatest advancements in knowledge and civilization, was kept hidden from future generations, in large part due to the human interpretation of the effects of one solitary bolt of lightning. Imagine how different the world could be today were it not for that one natural act, that one Act of God.

Three and one half centuries later, a solitary horseman in France would be struck down by another bolt of lightning, again inadvertently changing the course of history in monumental ways. Though I will describe his circumstances in detail later on, I mention him here because, in one respect, the story I am about to tell begins with that horseman nearly three centuries ago. The simple truth behind my story is that many of the conditions which exist in the world today are the result of plans and systems put in place many centuries ago. As in the case of the horseman, and the fire in the Forbidden City, occasionally events may transpire which change the course of history in ways that are far more complex than could ever be imagined at the time, and it is only through the benefit of hindsight that we are able to fully understand and appreciate their importance.

The purpose of this book is to bring to light certain factsand theories which may eventually help clarify the consensus of opinion about the history of our nation, just as the Gavin Menzies book has done. It is my hope that if one is open to the possibility that the established truth may not in fact be the whole truth, then there is room to add to the consensus of history, and thereby improve on it.

My story, however, does not describe the effects of an Act of God, or even an act of nature. It is concerned only with the acts of man, and of one man in particular, who happened to begin his remarkable life as my brother.

Although his actions were not as spectacular as a bolt of lightning, their effect on the course of history was, in their own way, every bit as impressive.

My name is Mark Hill, and as you have no doubt already realized, I am not much of a writer. I have spent the better part of my life as a carpenter by trade, working with my hands. As a result, working with my mind and writing about my thoughts are endeavors which do not come naturally or quickly for me, so I hope you will be patient and forgiving as I try to coax my crippled fingers and addled brain into telling this story as best I can. Since a good deal of the story is about the history of this country, which I only know because someone else told it first, I will do us all a favor and use those words to tell that part of the story whenever I can.

The fact is, I may only have two qualifications for writing this story, and neither have to do with knowing how to write well. The first qualification is that I’ve been around awhile, going on eighty years now, and in all that time I’ve gained a little perspective on this whole history lesson. The older I get, the shorter history seems to me. It just gets easier to see how one thing could lead to the next until, well, here we are. That may be why I never had any trouble understanding how one person’s recollection of events could be so different from the next. It’s like that old party game where you start a rumor at one end of a line, and each person whispers the information to the next until you see what a different story comes about at the end of the line. History, like stories, can be told in many ways. Like somebody once said, one man’s fiction is another man’s fact, and I’m quite sure it works just as well the other way around.

My other qualification is simply that, through no skill of my own, I happened to be around when the last part of this story was taking place, and I was just smart enough to realize I’d better pay attention. So, I began taking notes, and I learned a great deal about history, and about my brother, just as you are about to do. In the end, this story has a lot to do with history as my brother Sam came to understand and interpret it, which is probably a little different than what you have heard before. And, as you will soon find out, my brother was a little different, too.

Sam once told me that studying history was like traveling: the best part was always the journey, and never the destination. An old Hollywood actor named John Barrymore might have said the same thing about happiness, only better. He said, Happiness is not a station you’ll arrive at, it’s the train you’re on.

So, I guess you could say that this story is about my brother, Sam, and the long train he took to his own place in history. I was happy just to be along for the ride.

And, yes, I am also happy to still be around to tell you aboutit.

CHAPTER 1

We were born in the spring of 1952, in the midst of what would later come to be known as the Baby Boom following WWII. It was a heady time of great prosperity and optimism, when our country was at the top of its game, and economic security led to a minor explosion in the population of the land of the free.

I was the third son of a schoolteacher and the school nurse at Peddie, a small prep school for boys in the potato fields of central New Jersey, back when the Garden State actually had gardens. Our town’s main claim to fame was that it was exactly half way between New York City and Philadelphia, and I consider myself lucky to have escaped before the urban sprawl squeezed the life out of me like it did to our town.

Founded back in the post Civil War days by the Hon. Thomas B. Peddie as a Baptist school for boys and girls, Peddie had made the inauspicious decision to drop the female contingency from its ranks early on, but had remained steeped in ivy-covered Baptist tradition for decades thereafter. By the time I was old enough to attend classes there, reality had overtaken the school as sure as the assault of the urban sandwich, and there were already more Jews than Baptists, with the return of girls just a few short years away. I guess you could say that my first lessons about religion and sex taught me well, that money triumphs over all.

Following my older brothers, Luke and Peter, it was no surprise when I was given the biblical name of Mark, though I would later come to accuse my parents of a definite lack oforiginality and creativity in their selection of names. However, in time I would come to understand my parents’ desire to hedge their bets with the Lord by conforming to a more conservative, traditional appearance in their community. What I would eventually learn, and what I will tell you about now, is that my straight and narrow parents, while appearing traditional and conservative, had in their private hearts a wild and unconventional streak unknown to even their closest friends and relations.

That wild spirit would manifest itself early on in my life, on that very day when my parents entered Passaic General Hospital to have their baby, me, and instead returned home with not one little baby boy, but two. Perhaps the most surprising thing about their feat was that they managed to pull it off without causing so much as the slightest ripple on the peaceful pond of life at the Peddie School. Now that was creativity.

With boys of all ages and new babies all over the place, an unexpected extra baby was somehow easily assimilated into the picture. I suppose that it actually was easy enough at that time for my mother to blame the nascent state of prenatal medicine, and simply act as surprised as everyone else that her baby had miraculously turned into twins. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

Anyway, they named the miracle child Samuel, and from that day on he would share my life as my brother, though in fact we shared no blood. It was only much later in our lives that we would come to know the whole truth about the birth of Sam Hill.

I don’t remember as much as I should about our early years together, Sam and me. I guess the sixties and seventies did their part in erasing some of the times that happened before then, but at the time I’m sure that it never occurred to either of us that it would be at all necessary or even helpful to remember anything at all. We were just kids having fun, and that was really all that mattered. Life was good, and as far as I know, as normal as itgets. We did all the things the other kids were doing; Little League baseball, Pop Warner football, bikes with monkey bars and banana seats, and coming of age with the Beatles and what they called the second British Invasion. There were lots of black kids in our town, and some of them were our best friends. Even when a cross or three got burned and people started talking about Hightstown as the new hotspot for the Ku Klux Klan, we were either too young or too naive to think much about it or let it interfere with our lives. I don’t think we were particularly sheltered, or ignorant; we just mostly didn’t have any problem getting along with anybody. Looking back on it, maybe our childhood wasn’t as normal as I thought after all.

Primarily, though, I remember that Sam and I were buddies from the start, together through thick and thin, good and bad. We didn’t have a choice, but if we did I’m sure neither of us would have wanted it any other way.

Sure, there was talk every now and then about how Sam was adopted, or about how we couldn’t be twins because we didn’t look anything alike; but, we never took any of it too seriously, and none of it seemed to stick very long. The story we always liked to tell was that Sam was left with us by the Queen of England so he could grow up as an American, and when his turn came he would be King of the World. We both knew it would never happen, but I think Sam kinda liked the idea. It gave him a confidence that he could do almost anything, and that tomorrow would always be even better than today. Little did we know then just how close to the truth that idea really was.

Though my mother did not give birth to Sam, she raised him like one of her own, and she and Father Hill were the only real parents Sam ever had. Every now and then we’d get a reminder that Sammy wasn’t actually my twin brother; an overheard conversation or an envelope from out of state; but, for the most part, it just didn’t seem to matter. The elementary school kids may have been inquisitive, but they were also basically accepting of any kind of differences, and if nothing else, we sure were different. Aside from the obvious, black and white, there were kids in our school of almost every color and culture; a real melting pot of what I guess was the great lower middle class of immigrants that our country was famous for. Then there were the kids who truly were, shall we say, unique. There was Lyle the giant, Mikey the midget with the glass eye, Cindy with polio and crutches, Stanley in the wheelchair, and my always favorite girl, Mary Ann, who just developed way ahead of all the other girls. Of course, there was also the special class, the kids who couldn’t seem to graduate into high school no matter how old they got. We didn’t see much of them in the school, but they sure were special because they always seemed to be out on the ball fields at recess. Of the two strongest memories I have of the sixth grade, the Kennedy assassination being one, my favorite was the day we finally beat those guys at softball, with Sammy scoring the winning run.

Yes, grade school was a cake walk, and full of small adventures. It sounds like a cliché now, but we really did walk a mile to school, rain, snow, or neighbors’ dogs defied. Pete was four years older, Luke older still and in another world altogether, so Sam and I learned to look out for each other, and those walks home from school provided some of the best times of all. I guess in some ways that walk was our first taste of freedom, and aside from the little candy store on the way, the taste of freedom was sweet indeed.

When we entered Peddie in the seventh grade, though, our world suddenly got a lot smaller. We were living in a senior class dormitory, a big white Victorian house, with our family on the main floor and the students on the two floors above. Sam and I still shared a room that I’m sure was once a closet, and our walks to school, which were once across town, were now to the campus across the street. But what was worse was the social situation, or rather the lack of one. As an all male boarding school, the only way to keep those boys out of trouble was to keep the work schedule very tight. Classes on Saturdays, mandatory athletics every day, and study hall every night, kept everyone on a very short leash. I suppose that’s when I started to notice a real difference between me and Sam. I never could handle the academic pressure at Peddie all that well, and neverdid like it all that much. Sure, I did plenty of studying, but whenever I could I got by or around it, always looking for the easy way out. But Sam, now he was a different story, a real student. He always seemed a lot smarter than me, but on top of that he just worked his little butt off, always doing the absolute best job he could on whatever he was working on. He was a perfectionist, bordering on anal, and would throw himself completely into whatever was asked of him. Just good enough was never good enough for Sam; it was all or nothing, and it was never nothing. I think somehow he figured that if he was lucky enough to be getting that chance at a good education, he owed it to somebody to give it his best effort; and so he did.

As faculty sons, Sam and I were getting a real good academic education without having to pay the sizeable tuition, but we were also somewhat excluded from the typical dorm life of the rest of our classmates. And, as the years went by we got farther and farther away from the friends we had in town. The result was that we spent more time at home with schoolwork, and a surprising amount of time at home with our parents. Remarkably, while the schoolwork was always oppressive, the time spent with the old folks never seemed to bother us. Wild Bill Hill was an institution in his own right at Peddie, and while he was my father, he was looked up to by hundreds of other boys with that same amount of respect, and he treated most of the students as if they were his own sons. Maybe that had something to do with how Mom and Dad looked at bringing Sammy into the family. For Wild Bill, all the boys at school were important, but Sam and I knew that we alone had a special place in his heart. For that reason more than any other we eagerly awaited every summer vacation, knowing that for two solid months we would have Wild Bill all to ourselves.

When the New Jersey heat and humidity got so heavy you could cut it with a knife, we would pack up the old Chrysler and head north to Vermont, to Grandpa Hill’s funky old fishing cabin at Flat Rock, on Lake Champlain. If you have ever spent any time in Vermont in the summer, you know what I mean when I say that it is a truly magical place, especially around the

Champlain Valley. And if you have never been there you won’t know what you’re missing, so please don’t go, because the last thing they need up there is more people, especially just summer people from New York City or New Jersey, like us.

Grandpa Hill was quite a character himself, and in his presence Wild Bill showed his true childlike colors. Those summer vacations were a special time, and our family was never closer or had more fun than during those long summer days by the lake. The summer of 1969 was perhaps the most memorable of my entire life. Luke was home from his first tour of duty with the Marines in Vietnam, and Grandpa and Wild Bill, war veterans of distinction in their own right, were especially proud and happy, and no doubt relieved that Luke had made it back safely. Pete had spent a couple of misguided years at college, but had at least stayed out of the draft, and was due to start a new job in the fall with high expectations.

Sam and I were both looking forward to our final year at Peddie, and had already begun to strut our stuff like big dogs, just one step away from college and the great big world beyond. In our own minds, we were all grown up, and we were determined to explore every advantage that adulthood could provide. Every day of that incredibly fast summer, and every facet of our lives, was totally intoxicating.

Kathy was the youngest of the three kids who lived just down the road, part of an extended local family with a seemingly endless supply of relatives, all native Vermonters, and all real characters. The first time Sam and I met her two older brothers, one was chasing the other around with a hammer, and he wasn’t holding back. From that introduction I knew two things right away: that I really liked those guys, and that their little sister had to be one tough cookie.

Kathy proceeded to prove that fact every summer from then on, hanging with the boys through the best adventures that Lake Champlain had to offer. By the time we were sixteen, however, our relationship had evolved to an entirely new level, where neither of us were as interested in playing with the other boys. Fortunately, Sam lucked out that summer as well, hooking upwith a girl whose family was renting a cabin just down the shoreline. Her name