The Secret Service people were as upbeat as their President, as they so often drew their mood from POTUS, returning his smiles and nods with spoken greetings of their own: “Good morning, Mr. President!” repeated by four of them as Ryan passed, finding his way to the Oval Office.
“Good morning, Ben,” Ryan said cheerily, heading to his desk and falling into the comfortable swivel chair. “Tell me how the world looks.”
“We may have a problem. The PRC navy’s putting to sea,” the acting National Security Advisor said. The Secret Service had just assigned him a code name, CARD-SHARP.
“And?” Ryan asked, annoyed that the morning might be spoiled.
“And it looks like a major fleet exercise, and they’re saying there will be live-fire missile shoots. No reaction from Taipei yet.”
“They don’t have elections or anything coming up, do they?” Jack asked.
Goodley shook his head. “No, not for another year. The ROC has continued to spend money with the UN, and they’re quietly lobbying a lot of countries in case they go through with a request for representation, but nothing remarkable about that, either. Taipei is playing its cards close to the vest, and not making any noise to offend the
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mainland. Their commercial relationship is stable. In short, we have no explanation for the exercise.”
“What do we have in the area?”
“One submarine in the Formosa Strait, keeping an eye on a Chinese SSN.”
“Carriers?”
“Nothing closer than the Indian Ocean. Stennis is back in Pearl for engine repairs, along with Enterprise, and they’ll be there for a while. The cupboard is still pretty bare.” CARDSHARP reminded the President what he had himself said to his President only months before.
“What about their army?” the President asked next.
“Again, nothing new. We have higher-than-usual levels of activity, like the Russians said, but that’s been going on for a while.”
Ryan leaned back in his chair and contemplated a cup of decaf. He’d found on his speechifying trip that his stomach really did feel better that way, and remarked on it to Cathy, who’d merely smiled and said / told you so! “Okay, Ben, speculate.”
“I talked it over with some China people at State and the Agency,” Goodley replied. “Maybe their military is making a political move, interior politics, I mean, increasing their readiness state to let the other people on the Beijing Politburo know that they’re still around and still matter. Aside from that, anything else is pure speculation, and I’m not supposed to do that here, boss, remember?”
“And ‘don’t know’ means don’t know, doesn’t it?” It was a rhetorical question, and one of Ryan’s favored aphorisms.
“You taught me that on the other side of the river, Mr. President,” Goodley agreed, but without the expected smile. “You also taught me not to like things I can’t explain.” The national intelligence officer paused. “They know we’ll know, and they know we’ll be interested, and they know you’re new here, and they know you don’t need a hassle. So, why do it?” Goodley asked, also rhetorically.
“Yeah,” the President agreed quietly. “Andrea?” he said. Price, as usual, was in the room, pretending not to pay attention.
“Yes, sir?”
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“Where’s the nearest smoker?” Ryan said it entirely without shame.
“Mr. President, I don’t–”
“The hell you don’t. I want one.”
Price nodded and disappeared into the secretaries’ room. She knew the signs as well as anyone. Switching from regular coffee to decaf, and now a smoke. In a way it was surprising that it had taken this long, and it told her more about the intelligence briefing than the words of Dr. Benjamin Goodley did.
It had to be a woman smoker, the President saw a minute later. Another one of the thin ones. Price even brought a match and an ashtray along with her disapproving look. He wondered if they’d acted the same way with FDR and Eisenhower.
Ryan took his first drag, deep in thought. China had been the silent partner in the conflict–he still couldn’t use the word war, not even in his own mind–with Japan. At least that was the supposition. It all made sense, and it all fitted together nicely, but there was no proof of the sort to flesh out a SNIE–a Special National Intelligence Estimate–much less present to the media, which often as not required the same degree of reliability as an especially conservative judge. So. . . Ryan lifted the phone. “I want Director Murray.”
One of the nice things about the presidency was the use of the telephone. “Please hold for the President,” a simple phrase spoken by a White House secretary in the same voice one might use for ordering out a pizza, never failed to cause an instant, almost panicked, reaction on the other end of whatever line she might use. It rarely took longer than ten seconds to get the call through. This time it took six.
“Good morning, Mr. President.”
“Morning, Dan. I need something. What’s the name of that Japanese police inspector who came over?”
“Jisaburo Tanaka,” Murray replied at once.
“Is he any good?” Jack said next.
“Solid. As good as anybody I have working here. What do you want from him?”
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“I presume they’re talking a lot with that Yamata guy.”
“You may safely assume that a wild bear goes potty in the woods, too, Mr. President,” the acting Director of the FBI managed to say without a laugh.
“I want to know about his conversations with China, especially who his contact was.”
“That we can do. I’ll try to get him right now. Call back to you?”
“No, brief Ben Goodley in, and hell coordinate with the people down the hall,” Ryan said, using an old catch-phrase between the two. “Ben’s here now in my old office.”
“Yes, sir. Let me do it “now. It’s heading up to midnight in Tokyo.”
“Thanks, Dan. Bye.” Jack put the phone back. “Let’s start figuring this one out.”
“You got it, boss,” Goodley promised.
“Anything else happening in the world? Iraq?”
“Same news as yesterday, lots of people executed. The Russians fed us this ‘United Islamic Republic’ thing, and we all think it likely, but no overt move yet. That’s what I’d planned to do today, and–”
“Okay, then, get to it.”
“OKAY. WHAT’S THE drill for this?” Tony Bretano asked.
Robby Jackson didn’t especially like doing things on the fly, but that was the job of the newly promoted J-3, Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the previous week, he’d come to like the designate-Secretary of Defense. Bretano was one tough-minded little guy, but his snarl was mainly for show, and concealed a very thoughtful brain able to make quick decisions. And the man was an engineer–he knew what he didn’t know, and was quick to ask questions.
“We have Pasadena–fast-attack sub–in the strait already doing routine surveillance. We break her off the current job of trailing the PRC SSN and have her move northwest. Next, we move two or three additional boats into the area, assign them operating areas, and let them keep an eye on things. We open a line of communications
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with Taipei and have them feed us what they see and know. They’ll play ball. They always do. Ordinarily, we’d move a carrier a little closer, but this time, well, we don’t have one very close, and absent a political threat to Taiwan, it would appear to be an overreaction. We stage electronics-intelligence aircraft over the area out of An-derson Air Force Base in Guam. We’re hampered by the lack of a nearby base.”
“So, essentially we gather intelligence information and do nothing substantive?” the SecDef asked.
“Gathering intelligence is substantive, sir, but, yes.”
Bretano smiled. “I know. I built the satellites you’ll be using. What will they tell us?”
“We’ll probably get a lot of in-the-clear chatter that’ll use up every Mandarin-speaker they have at Fort Meade and tell us not very much about their overall intentions. The operational stuff will be useful–it’ll tell us a lot about their capabilities. If 1 know Admiral Mancuso–COM-SuePAc–he’ll have one or two of his boats play a little fast and loose to see if the Chinese can acquire one and prosecute it, but nothing overt. That’s one of our options if we don’t like the way this exercise is going.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if you really want to put the fear of God in a naval officer, you let him know there’s a submarine around–which is to say, Mr. Secretary, one appears unexpectedly in the middle of your formation and immediately disappears again. It’s a head game, and a nasty one. Our people are good at that, and Bart Mancuso knows how to use his boats. We couldn’t have defeated the Japanese without him,” Jackson said positively.
“He’s that good?” Mancuso was just a name to the new SecDef.
“None better. He’s one of the people you listen to. So’s your CiNiCPAc, Dave Seaton.”