“Mr. President, that’s operations, and that’s my business. We’d park Ike on the east side of the island. They can’t get to her by accident then. They’d have to come through three defense belts to do so, the ROC one over the strait, then Taiwan itself, and then the wall the battle-group commander puts up. I could also spot an Aegis at the bottom end of the strait to give us full radar coverage of the entire passage. If, that is, you order us to move Ike. The advantage for Taiwan, well, four squadrons of fighters, plus airborne radar coverage. That should make them feel more secure.”
“Which will allow me to play a better game if I shuttle back and forth,” the Secretary concluded.
“But that still leaves the IO uncovered. It’s been a long time since we did that.” Robby kept coming back to that, the other two noticed.
“Nothing else there?” Jack asked. He realized that he should have found out before.
“A cruiser, Anzio, two destroyers, plus two frigates guarding an under way-replenishment group based at Diego Garcia. We never leave Diego uncovered by warships, not with the Pre-Positioning Ships there. We have a 688-class sub in the area, too. It’s enough to matter, but not enough to project power. Mr. Adler, you understand what a carrier means.”
SecState nodded. “People take them seriously. That’s why I think we need it off China.”
“He makes a good case, Rob. Where is Ike now?”
“Between Australia and Sumatra, should be ap-
870
preaching the Sunda Strait. Exercise SOUTHERN CUP is supposed to simulate an Indian attack on their northwest coast. If we move her now, she can get to Formosa in four days plus a couple hours.”
“Get her moving that way, Rob, all possible speed.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Jackson acknowledged, his doubts still visible on his face. He gestured to the phone and, getting a nod, he called the National Military Command Center. “This is Admiral Jackson with orders from National Command Authority. Execute GREYHOUND BLUE, Acknowledge that, Colonel.” Robby listened and nodded. “Very well, thank you.” Then he turned to his President. “Okay, Ike will turn north in about ten minutes and make a speed run to Taiwan.”
“That fast?” Adler allowed himself to be impressed.
“The miracle of modern communications, and we already had alert orders to Admiral Dubro. This won’t be a covert move. The battle group will head through several narrows, and people will notice,” he warned.
“Press release won’t hurt,” Adler said. “We’ve done it before.”
“Well, there’s your card to play in Beijing and Taipei,” Ryan said, having exercised yet another executive order, but distantly concerned that Robby was unhappy about it. The really difficult matter was fuel. A fleet-replenishment group would have to move as well, to refill the bunkers of Elsenhower’s non-nuclear escort ships.
“Will you let on that we know about the shoot-down?”
Adler shook his head. “No, definitely not. It will be more unsettling to them if they think we don’t know.”
“Oh?” This came from a somewhat surprised President.
“Then I can decide when we ‘find out,’ Boss, and when that happens, I have another card to play–that way I can make it a big card.” He turned. “Admiral, don’t overestimate the intelligence of your enemy. Diplomats like me aren’t all that savvy on the technical aspects of what you do. That applies to people in foreign countries, too. A lot of our capabilities are unknown to them.”
“They have spooks to keep them informed,” Jackson objected.
871
“You think they always listen? Do we?” The J-3 blinked at that lesson and filed it away for future use.
IT HAPPENED IN a large shopping mall, an American invention that seemed designed for covert operations, with its many entrances, bustling people, and near-perfect anonymity. The first rendezvous wasn’t really a meeting at all. Nothing more than eye contact was made, and that not at a distance closer than ten meters, as the groups strolled past one another. Instead, each of the sub-groups performed a count, confirmed identity visually, and then each checked to be sure that there was no surveillance on the others. With that done, they all returned to their hotel accommodations. The real rendezvous would take place tomorrow.
Movie Star was pleased. The sheer audacity of this was very exciting indeed. This wasn’t the relatively simple task of getting one bomb-clad fool–heroic martyr, he corrected himself–into Israel, and the beauty of it was that had one of his teams been spotted, the enemy couldn’t possibly risk ignoring them. You could force the opposition into showing its hand, and so much the better to do it at a point in time when none of your people had done anything more than enter the country with false travel documents.
Doubts be damned, the leader of the operation told himself. There was the sheer beauty of being ready to do something right in the lion’s own den, and that was what kept him in the business of terrorism. In the lion’s own den? He smiled at the cars as he walked across the parking lot. The lion’s own cubs.
“SO WHAT ARE you doing?” Cathy asked in the dark.
“Scott leaves for China tomorrow morning,” Jack answered, lying next to his wife. People said that the President of the United States was the world’s most powerful man, but at the end of every day the exercise of that power surely seemed to exhaust him. Even his time at Langley,
872
with an auto commute each way every day, hadn’t worn him out as this job did.
“To say what?”
“Try to get them calmed down, defuse the situation.”
“You’re really sure 1 hat they deliberately–”
“Yes. Robby is positive, about as much as you are with a diagnosis,” her husband confirmed, staring up at the ceiling.
“And we’re going to negotiate with them?” SURGEON asked.
“Have to.”
“But–”
“Honey, sometimes–hell, most of the time a nation-state commits murder, they get away with it. I’m supposed to think about ‘the big picture,’ ‘the larger issues,’ and all that stuff.”
“That’s awful,” Cathy told him.
“Yes, it sure is. This game you have to play by its own rules. If you mess up, more people suffer. You can’t talk to a nation-state the way you talk to a criminal. There are thousands of Americans over there, businessmen and like that. If I get too far out of line, then things might happen to some of them, and then things escalate and get worse,” POTUS explained to her.
“What’s worse than killing people?” his physician-wife asked.
Jack didn’t have an answer. He’d come to accept the fact that he didn’t have all the answers for press conferences, or for all the people out there, or even for his own staff sometimes. Now he didn’t even have a single answer for his wife’s simple and logical question. Most powerful man in the world? Sure. With that thought, another day ended at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
EVEN IMPORTANT PEOPLE got careless, an eventuality made easier by a little creativity on the part of more careful folk. The National Reconnaissance Office was working hard to keep track of two places. Every pass of the reconsats over the Middle East and now the Formosa Strait resulted in copious numbers of download
873
pictures, literally thousands of images which photo-interpretation specialists had to examine one by one in their new building close to Dulles Airport. It was just one more task that couldn’t be done by computer. The readiness state of the UIR military had become the number-one priority item for the American government, as part of the Special National Intelligence Estimate now in preparation on White House orders. That meant the entire attention of the team fell that way, and for the other things, more people were called in to work overtime. These looked continuously at the photos downloaded from over China. If the PRC was going to make a real military move, then it would show in many ways. People’s Liberation Army troops would be out training and maintaining their equipment, or loading their tanks onto trains and the parking areas would look different. Aircraft would have weapons hanging from their wings. These were things a satellite photo would reveal. More care was taken to spot ships at sea–that was far harder, since they were not in fixed locations. America still had three photographic satellites aloft, each making two passes per day over the areas of interest, and they were spaced so that there was little “sad time.” That made the technicians feel pretty good about things. They had a continuous feed of data with which to firm up their estimates and so do their duty for their President and their country.
But they couldn’t watch everything everywhere, and one place they didn’t watch was Bombay, western headquarters of the Indian navy. The orbits of the American KH-11 satellites were well defined, as were their schedules. Just after the newest satelite swept over the area, with the other new one on the far side of the world, came a four-hour window, which would end with the overhead passage of the oldest and least reliable of the trio. Happily, it also coincided with a high tide.