“Oh,” Adler said first. “Well, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise.”
“Daryaei, isn’t it?” Clark asked.
“That’s our friend,” SecState confirmed.
Hearing this, Chavez got off ten rapid frames, showing the man getting off, to be greeted by some colleagues, who embraced him like a long-lost uncle, then guided him into the car. The vehicles pulled off. Chavez fired off one more, then put the camera back in his bag. They waited another five minutes before they were allowed to de-plane.
“Do I want to know what time it is?” Adler asked, heading for the door.
“Probably not,” Clark decided. “1 guess we’ll get a few hours of rack time before the meeting.”
At the bottom of the steps was the French ambassador, with one obvious security guard, and ten more locals. They would travel to the French embassy in two cars, with two Iranian vehicles leading and two more trailing the semi-official procession. Adler went with the ambassador in the first one. Clark and Chavez bundled into the
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second. They had a driver and another man in the front seat. Both would have to be spooks.
“Welcome to Tehran, my friends,” the guy riding shotgun said.
“Merci,” Ding replied, with a yawn.
“Sorry to get you up so early,” Clark added. This one would probably be the station chief. The people he and Ding had sat with at Paris would have called ahead to let him know that they were probably not State Department security types.
The Frenchman confirmed it. “Not your first time, I am told.”
“How long have you been here?” John asked.
“Two years. The car is safe,” he added, meaning that it probably wasn’t bugged.
“We have a message for you from Washington,” the ambassador told Adler in the leading car. Then he relayed what he knew about the Airbus incident at Taipei. “You will be busy when you return home, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, Christ!” the Secretary observed. “Just what we need. Any reaction yet?”
“Nothing I know of. But that will change within hours. You are scheduled to see the Ayatollah Daryaei at ten-thirty, so you have time for some sleep. Your flight back to Paris will leave just after lunch. We will give you all the assistance you request.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.” Adler was too tired to say much else.
“Any idea what happened?” Chavez asked in the trail car.
“We have only what your government has told us to pass along. Evidently there was a brief clash over the Strait of Taiwan, and a missile hit an unintended target.”
“Casualties?” Clark said next.
“Unknown at this time,” the local DGSE station chief said.
“Kinda hard to hit an airliner without killing somebody.” Ding closed his eyes in anticipation of a soft bed at the embassy.
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TH E SAME N EWS was given to Daryaei at exactly the same time. He surprised his fellow cleric by taking it without a visible reaction. Mahmoud Haji had long since decided that people who didn’t know anything couldn’t interfere with much.
FRENCH HOSPITALITY WAS not disgraced even by its transplantation to a place which could hardly have been more different from the City of Light. Inside the compound, three uniformed soldiers collected the Americans’ bags, while another man in some sort of livery conducted them to their quarters. The beds were turned down, and there was ice water on the nightstands. Chavez checked his watches again, groaned, and collapsed into the bed. For Clark, sleep came harder. The last time he’d looked at an embassy compound in this city . . . what was it? he asked himself. What was bothering him so much about this?
ADMIRAL JACKSON DID the brief, complete with videotape.
“This is the upload from Port Royal. We have a similar tape from The Sullivans, no real differences, so we’ll just use the one,” he told those in the Sit Room. He had a wooden pointer and started moving it around the large-screen TV display.
“This is a flight of four fighters, probably Jianjiji Hongzhaji-7s–we call it the B-7 for the obvious reason. Two engines and two seats, performance and capabilities like an old F-4 Phantom. The flight departs the mainland, and comes out a little too far. There’s a no-man’s-land right about here that neither side had violated until today. Here’s another flight, probably the same aircraft and–”
“You’re not sure?” Ben Goodley asked.
“We’ve ID’d the aircraft from their avionics, their radar emissions. A radar can’t directly identify an airplane by type,” Robby explained. “You have to deduce types by what they do, or from the electronic signatures of their
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equipment, okay? Anyway, the lead group is coming east, and crosses the invisible line here.” The pointer moved. “Here’s a flight of four Taiwanese F-16s with all the bells and whistles. They see the lead PRC group come too far and vector in on them. Then the lead group turns back west. Soon thereafter, right about . . . now, the trailing group lights off their radars, but instead of tracking their own lead group, they’re hitting the F-16s.”
“What are you saying, Rob?” the President asked.
“What this looks like, the lead group was simulating a dawn attack on the mainland, and the trail group was supposed to defend against the simulated attack. On the surface, it looks like a fairly standard training exercise. The trail group, however, lit up the wrong people, and when they shifted radar modes to the attack setting, one of the Taiwanese pilots must have thought he was under attack and so he pickled off a missile. Then his wingman did the same. Zap! Right here, a B-7 eats a Slammer, but this one evades it–damned lucky for him–and he gets off a missile of his own. Then everybody starts shooting. This F-16 jinks around one but walks right into another–see here, the pilot ejects, and we think he survived. But this element launches four missiles, and one of those acquires this airliner. Must have just barely made it all the way. We’ve checked the range, and it’s actually two miles over what we thought the missile could do. By the time it caught up and hit, the fighters have all turned back, the PRC guys because they were probably bingo-fuel, and the ROC guys because they were Winchester–out of missiles. All in all, it was a fairly sloppy engagement on both sides.”
“You’re saying it was a goof?” This came from Tony Bretano.
“It certainly looks that way, except for one thing–”
“Why carry live missiles on an exercise?” Ryan said.
“Close, Mr. President. The ROC pilots, sure, they’re carrying white ones because they see the whole PRC exercise as a threat–”
“White ones?” It was Bretano again.
“Excuse me, Mr. Secretary. White missiles are war shots. Exercise missiles are usually painted blue. The PRC guys, though, why carry heat-seekers? In situations like
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this, we usually don’t, because you can’t turn them off– once they go they’re entirely on their own, fire-and-forget, we call it. One other thing. All the birds fired at the F-16s were radar-homers. This one, the one that went for the airliner, seems to be the only heat-seeker that was launched. I don’t much like the smell of that.”
“Deliberate act?” Jack asked quietly.
“That is a possibility, Mr. President. The whole show looks just like a screwup, classic case. A couple fighter jocks get really hyped on something, you have an instant fur-ball, some people get killed, and we’ll never be able to prove otherwise, but if you look at this two-plane element, I think they were aiming for the airliner all along–unless they took it for a ROC fighter, and I don’t buy that–”
“Why?”
“It was heading the wrong way all the time,” Admiral Jackson answered.
“Buck fever,” Secretary Bretano offered.
“Why not engage people heading right for you instead of somebody heading away? Mr. Secretary, I’m a fighter pilot. I don’t buy it. If I’m in an unexpected combat situation, first thing I do is identify the threats to me and shoot ’em right in the lips.”
“How many deaths?” Jack asked bleakly.
Ben Goodley handled that one: “News reports say over a hundred. There are survivors, but we don’t have any kind of count yet. And we should expect that there were some Americans aboard. A lot of business goes on between Hong Kong and Taiwan.”
“Options?”
“Before we do anything, Mr. President, we need to know if any of our people are involved. We only have one carrier anywhere close, the Elsenhower battle group on the way to Australia for SOUTHERN CUP. But it’s a good bet that this won’t exactly help things out between Beijing and Taipei.”
“We’ll need some kind of press release,” Arnie told the President.
“We need to know if we lost any citizens first,” Ryan said. “If we did . . . well, what do we do, demand an explanation?”
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“They’ll say it was a mistake.” Jackson repeated. “They might even blame the Taiwanese for shooting first and starting it, then disclaim all responsibility.”