An advanced conventionally powered Submarine stationed at the US naval base in Okinawa, J-country, vanished. A report reached the Pentagon, along with more than a dozen of the Submarine's crewmen. It appeared to be a close encounter of the third kind: every crewman had seen a flash of white light, then inexplicably passed out. When they woke, they lay sprawled across a beach, where a task force searching for the missing Submarine found them, detained them, and brought them back to base.
Several had been on leave two nights earlier and had just assaulted an Okinawan girl. Now they were so frightened that they could not stop reciting the Bible, confessing their sins to God in their hearts. Westerners had this habit: the moment they saw white light, they assumed they had seen an angel.
The Pentagon took the incident extremely seriously. As the threat rating rose, it formed an independent special task force to investigate, pooled its resources, and sent investigators to Okinawa. In the end, they found nothing. Short of calling it a "miracle," there was no explaining why the "kidnappers" had left no trace.
The Pentagon did not believe in miracles, however, and naturally suspected China and Russia, the two countries closest to the Okinawa naval base. Besides, the Chinese had a particular fondness for Submarines, those masked assassins of the sea. An intelligence war quietly began, and agents disguised under all manner of identities slipped onto the mainland...
In its report, the Pentagon used subsequent events to sum up the kidnappers: well versed in ancient Chinese military strategy, exceptionally cunning, and extremely dangerous.
What happened next was this: a next-generation light multipurpose Tactical Vehicle, developed by a renowned American arms company to replace the Humvee and still in the development stage, vanished from a heavily guarded