THE EVIL SPREADING ITSELF out over Asia was nothing directly initiated by myself, but once it showed promise of escalating--and of providing a sinister locus for murderous influence well beyond the Mongol continent--you can bet I raked up options like a madman. When it proved to be a blue chip, I even cashed in some other irritants--notably the Latin variety: Cuba, Bolivia, Guatemala--in order to buy buy buy! It was a bullish market. And a satyr, with cloven feet and spiny paws, stays ahead by kicking and clawing.
Here was a nation full of mostly Buddhist losers heretofore ignored because of their incapacity to hurt a fly. (Take me literally on that one, I think it's in their scripture.) But then the Mao infection spread a splendid, gangrenous red across the continent, and while a hairy-faced hell raiser named Ho Chi Minh sowed in seventy-nine springtimes half a dozen communist parties, those peacenik rice eaters proved they could put up a mother of a defense. The blood sacrificed in the battle against alien aggressors--at first they murdered to win, then the murdered because they couldn't win--ran a red river through mountain and jungle, irrigating foxhole and rice paddie alike with the thirst for more.